Looking to impress everyone, including gluten eaters, with your mad gluten-free baking skillz? Or maybe you’re not gluten-free, but you need to bake for a friend or family member who is. Whatever your motivation, I’m here for you! First, a collage with links to six recipes that illustrate some of the secrets to great gluten-free baking (including a link to plenty of gluten-free all purpose flour blends). Then, the 10 Secrets To Great Gluten-Free Baking that I have learned over the last 10+ years of baking gluten-free. Learn these secrets, practice what I preach, and you’ll be baking your way into everyone’s hearts in no time!

[To access all of the recipes in the clickable collage below, hover over each photo for the recipe title, then click the picture to open a new window with that post and the entire recipe.]

1. Use superfine rice flour. This is my Number 1 Tip. Most all purpose gluten-free flour blends (see #3 below) are rice flour-based. Most commercially-available rice flours are not ground superfine, which means that they have some grit, as if there were a bit of sand in your cookie. Awful! Some people swear that they have never had a problem with any rice flour, and don’t ever taste any grit, no matter the blend or the brand. But here’s the thing: if you’re baking for anyone else, ever, chances are that they will be able to tell. And they’ll think that gluten-free baked goods are necessarily gritty. Buy Authentic Foods superfine gluten-free rice flours, and you’ll never go wrong.

2. Use gluten-free recipes. There are a number of gluten-free flour blends on the market that claim that they are cup-for-cup replacements for wheat flour in all of your old recipes. I’m sorry to say that simply isn’t true. Especially when you first begin baking gluten-free, set aside your tried and true family recipes. At least for now. I promise I’m working tirelessly to come up with replacement recipes for all of your old favorites!

3. Start with a good all-purpose gluten-free flour for heaven’s sake. There are a number of commercially available all purpose gluten-free flour blends, or you can blend your own. Here are reverse-engineered recipes for how to build your own versions of those ready-made all purpose gluten-free flour blends, if you don’t want to buy one ready-made. And please, for the love of Mike, no bean flour blends. Ever. Promise me! They taste… like beans. Not only that, but they don’t behave like rice flour-based blends in baking. They are not all-purpose flour blends, regardless of how they are named.

4. Know what flour blends to use when. Flours and flour blends are not all created equal. Throwing together a bunch of interesting-looking gluten-free flours does not work! Use this handy guide for which sort of gluten-free flour blend works best in which type of recipe. My favorite all-around all-purpose gluten-free flour blend is my Better Than Cup4Cup Gluten-Free Flour, but recipes like Gluten-Free Crepes and pancakes call for a lighter touch, and a lighter flour. Don’t worry—one solid all purpose gluten-free flour blend and one lighter, basic flour blend will be all you really need for most gluten-free recipes.

5. Mind the temperature of your ingredients. For baking cakes and cookies, ingredients should be at room temperature. Otherwise, the fat in the recipe (like butter or egg yolks) will not absorb properly into the dry ingredients. That leads to crumbly dough that doesn’t hold together. For baking pastries like Gluten-Free Elephant Ears (Palmiers), ingredients should be cold. Pastry is as much about architecture as it is about chemistry. Cold chunks of butter surrounded by flour expand when they hit the heat of the oven and push out the flour surrounding them, creating flaky layers. If the butter has melted before it hits the oven, no expansion, no flaking! So when a recipe specifies an ingredient temperature, mind it!

6. Follow the recipe without substitutions at least once through—if you can. Gluten-free tends to overlap with other allergen-free categories. If you can’t tolerate dairy but someone in your family can, try making it with dairy the first time. Then experiment. Early successes will fuel your confidence and please your audience of gluten-free and gluten-eaters alike, and you’ll be motivated to do more!

7. Use an oven thermometer. Most ovens are off by about 50°F (mine is off by at least that much!). Rather than having your oven professionally calibrated, hang a simple oven thermometer in your oven, and use that as your exclusive guide to temperature. A basic oven thermometer is super cheap, and even if your oven is properly calibrated, it will drift off of proper calibration over time. Just think—a too-hot oven might just be the thing standing between you and baking success!

8. Make a copycat recipe at home. Love Starbucks’ baked goods and think you’ve said goodbye to them forever? Au contraire, mon frère. Try out these simple Starbucks-Style Gluten-Free Blueberry Oat Bars on your most dubious family member, and you’ll see.

9. Master one great recipe for gluten-free bread. They think we have terrible bread. Make them these Gluten-Free Texas Roadhouse-Style Rolls, and prove them wrong!

10. Get a digital kitchen scale. Measure your dry ingredients, liquid sweeteners (1 tablespoon = 21 grams), and even water (1 fluid ounce = 1 weighted ounce) by weight. Dry, and even wet, measuring cups can vary quite a lot. Plus, different methods of transferring flour from the source to an ingredient bowl, as well as simple human error (we’re all human!) can cause significant differences in flour weights, which changes the recipe chemistry. Level the playing field by using a simple digital kitchen scale. Any digital scale that is accurate up to 1 gram and at least one-tenth of an ounce is just fine. And using a scale is a great way to cut down on the number of dishes and cups you dirty when baking. Score!

Nicole Hunn is a gluten-free blogger and cookbook author. She blogs at Gluten-Free on a Shoestring, and her most recent book is Gluten-Free on a Shoestring Bakes Bread: Biscuits, Bagels, Buns, and More. If they can make it with gluten, we can make it without!