Granny’s Methods
Welcome to Granny’s Methods
Baking isn’t just about what you put into a recipe. How you put those ingredients together matters, too.
Preparation methods develop around particular ingredients and particular kinds of baking. When the ingredients change, the method may need to change with them.
That’s especially true in grain-free baking.
Here at Grain-Free Granny’s, we don’t assume that a traditional method will automatically work just because a recipe uses familiar ingredients. We pay attention to what each ingredient is doing—and sometimes that means changing the order, the temperature, or even the way ingredients are combined.
This is where we keep the methods behind the recipes.
Mixing Order
Why does the order matter?
Ingredients don’t all behave the same way when they meet.
Some absorb liquid. Some dissolve. Some need to be dispersed through fat. Some need to be hydrated before they can do their job. Others can turn a perfectly manageable mixture into a thick, stubborn mess if they’re added at the wrong time.
So mixing order isn’t simply a set of instructions to memorize.
It’s a way of controlling how ingredients interact.
Here are a couple of examples from Granny’s kitchen.
Egg + Sugar Before the Fat
Why we don’t cream butter and sugar
Traditional baking often begins by creaming butter and sugar together. That’s an important technique in wheat-based baking because creaming incorporates air into the butter, creating tiny air cells that contribute to the finished structure.
But our grain-free cookies don’t have the same structural system.
In many of our cookies, the egg is an important part of the structure. Its proteins will coagulate during baking and help create the network that holds the cookie together.
So instead of blindly following traditional techniques, we ask, What needs to happen first to build the structure we want?
For grain-free cookies, we mix the egg and sugar together first because the sugar needs to interact with the water in the egg before the coconut flour is added. This helps control how the coconut flour absorbs moisture and ultimately affects the texture of the finished cookie.
The fat can then contribute what we want from it—tenderness, richness, and control over spread—without asking it to perform the same structural job that creamed butter performs in a traditional wheat cookie.
The method follows the ingredients.
That’s an important distinction in grain-free baking.
Honey + Cocoa Butter Before Cocoa
Why honey chocolate has a different mixing order
Traditional chocolate-making can combine cocoa butter and cocoa powder first and then incorporate the sugar.
Honey changes the system.
Honey isn’t simply “sugar in another form.” It is a viscous, water-containing sweetener, and cocoa powder is highly absorbent.
If you add the cocoa powder to the cocoa butter first and then try to work honey into that mixture, the cocoa can interact with the water in the honey before the honey has been properly dispersed through the fat.
The result?
A mess.
Instead, when making our honey chocolate, we:
Melt the cocoa butter → incorporate the honey → add the cocoa powder.
The honey is first dispersed into the melted cocoa butter. Once that system is established, the cocoa powder can be incorporated much more successfully.
Again, the method isn’t arbitrary.
We’re controlling which ingredients meet first.
Controlling Crystallization
Why does crystallization matter?
Sugar crystals can change the texture of a finished caramel, turning what should be smooth into something grainy. When we’re working with less-refined sugars like palm sugar, controlling crystallization becomes an important part of the method.
Brushing Down the Sides of the Pan
Traditional caramel is usually made with refined white sugar. Palm sugar is much less refined, making our palm sugar caramel more prone to seeding.
As our caramel cooks, sugar can collect and crystallize on the insides of the pan. If those crystals fall back into the caramel, they can act as nuclei, encouraging more sugar to crystallize. This is what is known as “seeding” and it results is a grainy caramel instead of a smooth one.
To prevent this, we brush the insides of the pan with water as the caramel begins to cook, keeping any sugar above the syrup line dissolved and out of the caramel.
As it begins to boil, we stop brushing and let the caramel cook undisturbed.
Brushing isn’t about cleaning the pan. It’s about preventing crystals from getting back into the caramel.