All Cakes Considered - Melissa Gray [10]
Lemon glaze: Mix ¾ cup of confectioners’ sugar with 1½ tablespoons of milk and 1 teaspoon of lemon extract (or 2—taste it, see how much tartness you want). Beat until smooth and drizzle over the top of the cooled cake.
And you thought you were just learning one cake. Darlin’, congrats! You’ve now got at least seven! Not only have you learned the basics of making a typical cake; once you’ve taken it to work, you’ll become office hero for the day!
True cake Lore
In many traditions, if you find a coin or some other trinket baked into a ring-shaped cake, it’s considered good luck. King cakes—those yeasty, cream-cheese-and-praline-filled cakes drizzled with colored sugar that are eaten during Mardi Gras—have a little plastic baby inserted inside. The person who gets the baby has to bring the cake the next year.
Well, my pal Marguerite Nutter, a baking novice, decided to give this sour cream pound cake recipe a whirl for Thanksgiving with her mom, stepfather, and sisters. The cake looked beautiful (she was so proud, she sent me a picture from her cell phone), and she said it tasted great! And there was a surprise in it, too: the silver-foil seal from her brand-new bottle of vanilla extract. When her five-year-old nephew found it, sister Patty said (quick as a flash) “That means you win a prize!” and Marguerite, without missing a beat, handed him a five-dollar bill.
Keep this story in mind if you ever have an alien-object-cooked-in-the-cake mishap.
What’s In That Cake?
A briefing on ingredients, with tips
So I Told You to Forget the Adage “Baking Is a Science” Because I Didn’t Want You to Get Overly Anxious. Before You Continue Baking, Though, I’d Like to Briefly Explain a Few Things So That You Understand Why Everyone Always Says “Baking Is a Science.”
Flour, sugar, fait, and eggs are the basic building blocks of cake. They’re most often helped by leavening agents, salt, and flavorings. What begins in your mixer and finishes in your oven is a chemical reaction, albeit a tasty one. Let’s get molecular for a moment.
Liquids in your batter, when heated, produce gases with wanderlust: They don’t want to stay put in a cake-pan prison—they want to escape into the freedom of the atmosphere. Some gas is already present in your batter before it even hits the oven: Air, which is a mixture of gases (about 78 percent nitrogen and about 21 percent oxygen), is introduced when butter and sugar are creamed and when the other ingredients are mixed in. And carbon dioxide is created when a leavening agent, like baking soda or baking powder, reacts to liquid in the batter. When the batter is heated, the air and CO2 are trapped by weblike structures formed by proteins in flour and eggs. During their jailbreak attempt, the gases pull those protein structures up with them—that’s how a cake rises. Any anomalies in your ingredients, your mixing, or your baking can disrupt that process.
And now for the ingredients. In the baking aisle of your friendly neighborhood grocery store (also home to those damnable cake mixes), there’s a variety of different flours, sweeteners, and fats.
Flour
Flour is generally made by milling the kernel of soft and hard wheat. There are flours made from rice or soybeans, but they’re not ideal for baking cake.
Bread flour is made from hard wheat and is high in protein, about 14 percent. It’s used in making cakes that are leavened with yeast, like kugelhopf.
All-purpose flour is a combination of hard and soft wheat, and has a protein content of about 10 percent. It’s enriched flour that’s usable in all cake recipes, and preferable in cakes with fruits and nuts because it provides a stronger structure than cake flour. You’ll notice two types of all-purpose flour: bleached and unbleached. Bleached is made white by the use of chemicals; unbleached flour turns ivory or