First I would like to say that one of my daughters did food technology yesterday. She had to think of a sweet flavour for her scones and take the ingredients in to make them at school. She came home with the most traditional but very tasty, moist and more-ish apple and cinnamon scones. Her recipe flavour worked wonderfully and all I had to do was buy the dried apple slices for her to use. Her scones were perfectly baked and tasted nice as they were but even better with butter on them. A girl after my own heart and what a brilliant flavour combination she did. She reminds a lot of what I was like when I studied Food Science at university and how my need to change recipes is still part of me now. When I asked her what others in the class made she told me that most of them made chocolate chip scones. Not very inventive but who am I to judge. I am probably biased but I think she is a natural and definitely takes after myself. (hahaha :))
At last I have done what I have said I would do and prepared some hints and tips for selecting and using ingredients. These are thing that I have found out by various means, experimentation, trial and error and advice from other home bakers. When I start to bake something and I find that either I am missing an ingredient, the final product will be very expensive, or the customer is allergic to a particular ingredient, then I have to change the recipe, using alternative ingredients. Sounds as though it can be a bit complicated but in actual fact, half the fun of baking is seeing how these ideas turn out and learning from them.
I have created a new page on my website with this information and also incorporated a table of alternative ingredients that you can use when altering a recipe to suit any circumstance, including different dietary requirements, for example, lactose free and diabetic.