All Cakes Considered - Melissa Gray [12]
If you open up your brown sugar at a later point and discover a hard brick o’ brown sugar, try this: toss in an apple slice and wait 24 hours. OR simply wet a paper towel, wring it out, and wrap it around the brown sugar brick and place in a microwave-safe bowl. Microwave it for about 20 seconds. Crumble the now revived pieces of brown sugar and repeat with any hard brick parts left over.
Other sweeteners include corn syrup, honey, and the above-mentioned molasses. Corn syrup is made from cornstarch, and there are two varieties: light and dark. Dark has a slight flavor, so light is the preferred syrup for most bakers. The taste of honey depends on what flowers the bees pollinated—the most common are clover, orange blossom, and lavender. Honey will keep for years at room temperature, but it often crystallizes. Carefully warming the jar or bottle up in the microwave on low power for 10 seconds at a time, or gradually heating the jar or bottle in a saucepan of water on low heat will return it to a liquid state. Molasses is generally used in gingerbread and sometimes in spice cakes. Most bakers prefer unsulphured molasses, meaning no sulphur has been used in processing it.
Fats
Fats provide moisture and flavor; solid fats help trap air in your cake batter during creaming.
Butter comes from the cow. Margarine does not. It has the same calories as butter, though it may be lower in cholesterol or cholesterol-free. My cholesterol’s fine, so I use butter because I prefer the taste and texture. But you can use margarine if you please.
Use unsalted butter for baking—it’s sweeter, and it will allow you to control the amount of salt you use in your cake. It’s also more expensive, and it goes bad faster. Stored tightly wrapped, it will keep in your refrigerator for 2 weeks, but freeze it and it will be good for up to 8 months.
The main thing to remember when using butter for cakes is this: when creaming is involved, you want it at room temperature. It should be soft enough so that it will hold the indention when you press down on it with your finger. I know I said that in the previous chapter, but I want you to remember it.
Getting butter to room temperature can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours, so you’re going to be tempted to find a shortcut. Temptation may present itself to you in the form of a microwave. Try warming your butter for 10 seconds on low power, but you’ll have to rotate the butter if your microwave doesn’t do that for you—you do not want it to melt. If you have a range-top oven, you can start preheating with the wrapped butter on the range top. Again, you need to remember to rotate your butter. Being that vigilant is a pain in the butt, so I always just leave the butter out on the counter and come back an hour later.
Vegetable shortening is made from hydrogenated vegetable oil. Crisco is probably the most recognizable brand. It will last for a year if it’s stored tightly wrapped in the refrigerator. I like to use “stick” shortening—the quotation marks are there because it is so soft that calling it a stick is an abuse of the English language. The beauty of “stick” shortening is that measurements are printed out on the foil wrapper. Use the unflavored shortening, not the butter-flavored variety, for the cakes in this book.
Oils are made from vegetables, nuts, seeds, and fruits. For baking, you want to use oil without a strong taste, like safflower or canola. Oils can go rancid, so taste before using. Canola, if stored away from heat and sunlight, can keep for up to a year. The shelf life of safflower, however, is a sad, fleeting thing—safflower