AURORA, Colo. — As we head into the holidays, lots of Coloradans are baking treats for loved ones. But if your cakes are sinking in the middle or your cookies are spreading across the pan, it’s not you – it’s the altitude.
As your elevation increases, the blanket of air above you gets lighter. So, in the Mile High City and other high-altitude spots in Colorado, you probably need to adjust your recipes.
To learn the tips and tricks you’ll need, Denver7 met up with Nicole Hampton, who runs the baking blog Dough-eyed and authored two cookbooks on successfully bake at high-altitude.
“It was truly a lot of trial and error,” Hampton said. She started her blog while living at sea level. But when she moved back to Denver, her recipes didn’t work.
That’s because with less air pressure, two things happen: Liquids evaporate faster and boil at lower temperatures, and the leavening gases in baked goods expand more quickly.
When you’re baking a cake from a recipe written for sea level, “it rises too quickly in the oven, and then it collapses before it's finished baking,” Hampton said.
At higher altitudes, “you want to slow down that rising process,” she said.
For cakes, it helps to add in more flour, usually an extra two tablespoons to a quarter cup of flour depending on the quantity of the recipe.
For both cakes and cookies, you’ll want to reduce your leavener, Hampton said. That can mean cutting down your baking soda or baking powder by about 25% compared to the sea level recipe.
With breads and other yeasted doughs, Hampton doesn’t change the ingredients at all. She just watches the rise time – doughs rise faster at high-altitude, so it’ll be ready to bake sooner than a sea level recipe suggests.
For all baked goods, the higher altitude means liquids – like milk, vanilla or coffee – evaporate faster, which can make flavors less punchy.
So, Hampton suggests starting with stronger flavors. Replacing light brown sugar with dark brown gives a deeper molasses flavor. Swapping natural cocoa powder for Dutch process cocoa powder, “always makes things more chocolatey,” she said.
“Vanilla at all altitudes is a measure with your heart situation,” she said with a laugh. But her preference is to add more vanilla than sea level recipes include.
Through her test bakes, Hampton’s learned effective ratios for adjusting recipes, which she shares in her blog’s high-altitude baking cheat sheet and in her cookbooks.
But the easiest way for bakers to whip up treats at higher elevations is to use recipes developed for their kitchens. That’s why Hampton created the recipes in Sugar High: Sweet & Savory Baking in Your High-Altitude Kitchen and High-Altitude Breakfast: Sweet & Savory Baking at 5000 Feet and Above.
When Denver7 stopped by Hampton’s home kitchen in Aurora, she was baking chocolate crinkle cookies.
“When they bake, they'll become kind of cracked, and the chocolate will poke through, and it'll look beautiful,” she said.
These fudgy cookies coated in powdered sugar are one of the treats she’s excited to share with loved ones over the holidays. Every year she gifts cookies boxes to friends at their Secret Santa party.
“They're so good. I am obsessed with them,” she said.
But no matter what you’re baking, Hampton’s biggest advice is to try things out and stick to what works for you.
“There's a lot of tips online for how to adjust high-altitude recipes these days,” she said. “I'm not here to debunk any of those. If you have a really good tip, something that's worked for you, please keep using it,” she said.
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