A Question of Balance

• If you want to make a batch of muffins with a pleasant orange flavor, adding orange juice might seem a simple option. In practice, that kind of direct approach is problematic. No recipe works properly unless its wet and dry ingredients are balanced, and there's just not enough room in most cake or muffin recipes for large quantities of extra liquids. You can usually get away with adding a few tablespoons of liquid -- especially if you can reduce another liquid ingredient -- but more than that affects the texture. The wetter a batter is, the more gluten the flour can develop. That's a good thing in bread, but it makes cakes or muffins tough and chewy.

Work on Your Concentration

• Fruit juice concentrates present a neat solution to that thorny problem. They're made commercially by evaporating 75 percent of the water from fruit juice, in special equipment that speeds evaporation by creating a partial vacuum. You can make your own by simmering juice to 1/4 of its original volume, though its flavor won't be as fresh. These concentrates are much thicker and more intensely flavored than the natural juice, simply because they're not as watery. A few juices such as lemon and lime are potent enough to use in their natural condition, but most others are more useful to bakers once they're concentrated.

Adding a Concentrate

• Professional bakers have access to a broad range of concentrated fruit juices from commercial suppliers, but the frozen-juice section of your local supermarket offers plenty of options as well. Usually, 2 or 3 tablespoons -- 1 to 1 1/2 fluid ounces -- adds a pleasant fruit flavor to your baked goods. One or two experiments will usually tell you how much of any given juice to add, depending whether you want a delicate or a bold flavor. Reduce other liquid ingredients such as milk or cream, if possible, to the same extent. If eggs are the only other liquid, don't reduce them. Add an extra tablespoon or two of flour instead, to compensate.

A Step Beyond

• Sometimes, even a juice concentrate isn't concentrated enough to achieve the flavor you want. In those cases, reducing the juice even further -- to a semi-solid paste, in some cases -- might be necessary. At that degree of concentration the juice has less effect on your balance of wet and dry ingredients, which can simplify your recipe. For best results, add these fruit-thick pastes or syrups to the creamed butter and sugar, at the time you add the eggs and flavoring extracts. The thickened juice will be dispersed evenly through the fat, and then through the dough or batter.