All Cakes Considered - Melissa Gray [5]
Another reason you want to read through your recipes before you begin: you want to understand what techniques you’ll be using to make said cake. If there’s something you don’t know, or aren’t clear about, it’s time to get online and Google it or, better yet, call a friendly, experienced baker.
Here Are The Directions For Grandma Gray’s Sour Cream Pound Cake, Almost Exactly As She Scrawled Them On an Index Card, With Only a Few Changes For Clarification:
There’s a lot of baking shorthand in this. What does “cream” mean? Do I add the eggs all together? How do I combine the dry ingredients? What’s a tube pan? How does it get greased? Is the cake absolutely done at 90 minutes?
So many questions, grasshopper. But Grandma Gray is not alone; many recipes assume you know exactly what they’re talking about.
Two
“Center Rack In Oven And Preheat To 325 Degrees F.”
That’s our SECOND important step to making a cake, after we’ve read over the recipe.
What does “center rack” mean? Take a look at your tube pan. Look at how tall it is—I’m guessing about 4½ inches. When you put that pan in the oven, you want the body of the cake to be as dead center as possible: the better for even baking. Next, look at your rack in the oven and figure out how low or high it needs to be so that your cake goes where it should—in the center of the oven.
“Preheat” means exactly what you think it means. So does 325 degrees F (Fahrenheit).
Three
“Prepare a Pan.”
This is not about sitting down and having a conversation or exam review with your cake pan; it’s about getting your pan all nice and greasy. Wouldn’t it be heartbreaking to have used fresh ingredients and a proper mixing technique only to have the Man Catcher refuse to rise to its full glory?
For this cake, I specified a 10-inch, basic tube pan (a tube pan has straight sides, tube in the middle). This recipe also works well in a Bundt pan (a Bundt pan has decorative sides, tube in middle. I’ll tell you more about the history of Bundt pans later in the book). If you want to try this cake in a 9-inch square pan or a couple of loaf or layer pans, it will work fine, but you’ll need to halve the quantity for each ingredient in the recipe and halve the baking time. But a tube pan is the pan of choice for pound cakes as far as I’m concerned, and every baker needs one.
A pound cake, after all, has a dense batter. Originally they were made with a pound of sugar, a pound of butter, a pound of flour, and a pound of eggs; that’s why it’s called a pound cake. (What, you thought I wasn’t going to explain that to you? Oh, ye of little faith.) Large amounts of dense batter tend to bake better in tube pans, simply because that tunnel in the middle gets the heat into the center, thus avoiding the problem of overbaked on the outside, underbaked on the inside. We don’t like gooey when a lot of eggs are involved. That’s not just a baking faux pas, it’s an icky no-no.
A word about Pans
Not all tube pans are made equally. Some are aluminum, some are coated, some are heavy, some are made of silicone and can be rolled up and stored with little fuss. Others may disagree, but I HATE silicone pans and don’t recommend them. I’ve never had a cake come out of one in the proper shape (it turns out oblong, rather than round) and the silicone pan didn’t release the cooled cake without pulling chunks off. So, just say “no” to silicone.
Also, say “no” to el cheapo pans: After ten or twelve cakes, I’ve found bits of the pan’s coating on my cake crumb. Teflon is not an ingredient I want to serve to my co-workers. If you plan to bake more than five times a year, every year, spend the money and invest in at least one good tube pan and one good Bundt pan. Depending on the brand and design, you’ll spend between $25 and $50, and it will last you for decades and maybe a lifetime. You want a 10-inch tube pan that holds at least