Brown Sugar

Brown sugar isn't something to make because you want serious control over the flavor of the brown sugar. Nor is it something that you'll make because it's better fresh. Brown sugar is something that you make because you realized that you don't have any, and you need some, and you don't really want to go to the store just so you can get some brown sugar.

If you are baking and you need brown sugar, you don't even need to make the brown sugar. Instead of 1 cup of brown sugar, you just use 1 cup of granulated sugar to either 1.5 tablespoons of molasses or 1/4 cup of molasses, depending on if you want to substitute light or dark brown sugar, respectively.

However, if you need it to actually be brown sugar, perhaps because it's going to be a topping on something or in-between layers or similar, then you take the proportions of sugar to molasses listed above and…

Okay, sometimes when I write these, I feel kind of bad, because I'm just telling you to do something really amazingly simple, and it hardly seems worth writing. Just a quick moment later, I realize that this is exactly why Ben and I started this site, to show just how ridiculously easy making things from scratch really is. And now, back to the recipe.

… you take the molasses and the sugar, pour it into a bowl, and stir.

That's pretty much it. The molasses won't want to mix at first, so there'll be some scraping off of the spoon and similar, but keep it up. It'll get there. You probably won't make it quite as uniform as you would if you got it from the store, but there are few times when you really need to ensure a great presentation with brown sugar.