Pay Attention To Ratios When Making Homemade Brown Sugar

One of the classic mistakes people make when baking a cake (or cookies or brownies) is running out of essential ingredients when you've already started mixing your batter. Luckily, discovering that you're missing brown sugar isn't the end of your quest for sweet treats. There's one simple ingredient that you need for making homemade brown sugar from white sugar: molasses. The process actually couldn't be simpler ... with one small caveat. When making brown sugar at home, you really need to be cognizant of your ratio of molasses to white sugar to make sure that you nail the taste and texture of the finished product.

Hana Dreiling, founder and head baker of Holey Grail Donuts, which has locations in both Los Angeles and Hawaii, knows a thing or two about baking and all the sugar you need to do it. Dreiling spoke exclusively with Foodie about the intricacies of mixing up brown sugar from scratch. She told us that there's a magic formula: "one cup of sugar to one tablespoon of molasses." The ratio is scalable, meaning that you can use it to make more or less product as you need. Just remember that there are 16 tablespoons in a cup. And if you want to make dark brown sugar, add two tablespoons to a cup for a deeper, more pronounced flavor. 

Brown sugar doesn't behave the same as white sugar in recipes because of the inclusion of molasses. This brings more moisture to the ingredient, meaning it packs more tightly in a measuring cup and sometimes has an unfortunate tendency to cake up and become unusable over time — which is why a pro kitchen tip is to store brown sugar with a slice of bread to absorb unwanted moisture. Not observing the formula for white sugar to molasses puts you at risk of creating either overly sticky brown sugar that could introduce too much moisture into your recipe (too much molasses), or else turning out an insufficiently-flavored sugar that doesn't behave the same way that brown sugar is expected to (not enough).

Dark brown sugar has more acid than light brown, thanks to its extra helping of molasses. It stands to reason that, if you introduce even more molasses, the acidity would go higher still. This could potentially compromise the integrity of your baked goods, in addition to the other problems mentioned above.

Dreiling notes that, when using raw sugar, you may need to tinker a bit more with the molasses to sugar ratio. "You might want to reduce the molasses slightly," she says, "since it already has a bit of that molasses flavor."