It might be cheap, but you might as well be using brown crayon bits in your baking if you opt for the bargain supermarket brand of chocolate. (Shutterstock.com)

Or, the ten ingredients in your baking arsenal you should probably trash after reading this.

1. Nuts: Nuts should be kept in an airtight container, ideally in the fridge. For best flavour, they should be fresh and sweet-tasting.

Nuts develop a distinct bitter rancid taste when they're off, and shamefully, many stores actually sell them close to or past this point. Buy only as much as you need at a time, and check your stock before using it to make sure you're starting with something fresh.

2. Flour: If it smells like Playdoh, chuck it. White flour can last in a cool, dark, dry place for about a year; whole grain flours and meals no more than three to six months.

3. Salted butter: In fact, keep this for toast, and buy unsalted butter for baking.

Unsalted butter goes off much faster, and should be kept in the fridge until needed. Before you use it in a recipe, smell it – rancid butter is not shy. Good butter will smell sweet and creamy.

4. Poor chocolate: It might be cheap, but you might as well be using brown crayon bits in your baking if you opt for the bargain supermarket brand. Good chocolate is a marvelous balance of cocoa butter, cocoa solids, pure vanilla and sugar.

Cocoa butter is a very rich fat that happens to melt at the exact temperature of the human body, hence that silky mouth-feel, and cocoa solids are what give chocolate its unique flavour. Good chocolate can be as distinctive as good wine or coffee – bringing to the recipe all the depth of flavour and nuances of where and how it was grown and processed.

It is worth every penny to seek out high quality chocolate for your baking; the difference will be astonishing.

5. Spices: If you can't remember when you bought them, they're too old. Yes, they go bad, but not in a rotten kind of way; more like they taste increasingly like dust the longer they sit on your shelf.

To save money, skip the costly little bottles in the grocery store, and head for the bulk section instead: buy spices and herbs in small amounts, and keep them away from heat, light and moisture. They'll cost only pennies this way, and if you need to refresh your supply, it won't break the bank.

6. Baking powder: Baking powder can lose efficacy after a prolonged period of time. A good rule of thumb is no more than one year from when you purchased it.

To help keep track, use a permanent marker to write the date on the package and check it periodically to keep it fresh.

7. Baking soda: Baking soda is a great absorber. The longer it sits, the more aromas, moisture and interesting flavours it collects, none of which are particularly helpful to your baking.

As with baking powder, write the purchase date on the carton, and when a year comes around, replace your box.

8. Dried fruit: Dry is one thing; desiccated is another. The longer dried fruit sits, the more moisture it loses. Eventually, it can become very nearly petrified.

In addition, dried fruit, while well-preserved by the drying process and by the inherent high sugar content, can go bad. Look for signs of mould before using, and keep leftover fruit in airtight containers away from heat and light.

9. Vanilla: If it's not pure, get rid of it. Yes, it does make that much of a difference, especially in a simple recipe like a pound cake where it is the primary flavouring.

Real vanilla is one of the most precious liquids on earth. It is made by hand-pollinating the vanilla planifolia orchid on the one night a year it opens; harvesting the resulting beans, alternately sweating and sun-drying them, fermenting them, and using them to make a potent, heady extract. The artificial stuff is made from wood pulp. Wood. Pulp.

10. Nutmeg: I admit, it's not the most commonly used ingredient in your kitchen, but it does play a role in a good many dessert recipes, and there is just no similarity between the dusty bottled stuff and a freshly grated nutmeg.

The latter is warm and spicy, with no hint of the familiar bitterness many of us associate with that brown grit on the surface of our eggnog. Plus, whole nutmegs are easily available, a little $2 grater will last forever, and the whole spice stays fresh for literally years. So all around, a win-win, and you can impress your friends at Christmas by grating it over their drinks to order.

Regan Daley worked for several years as a pastry chef in some of Toronto's most prominent restaurants, including the celebrated Avalon (named by Gourmet magazine as one of the best in North America), where her elegant and original dessert creations, such as Valrhona Molten Chocolate Cakes, quickly become household words. She now conducts dessert and pastry-making seminars and is a contributing editor for President's Choice Magazine. She lives in Toronto with her husband and their two sons.

Learn more about Regan Daley and her cookbook, In the Sweet Kitchen, at http://sweetkitchen.regandaley.com.

---