Seeking Cake Comments
I did two things in the past week that worried me because I enjoyed them. I replanted some herbs we had that were growing poorly in pots, and I baked a cake. I like to say that gardening and cooking are two things I might enjoy in theory, but in practice just aren’t worth the effort when I have so little free time. Cooking I know something about, but gardening I know next to nothing of.
One thing about cooking, you sometimes just can’t get exactly what you want unless you make it yourself. Cakes in particular are this way. Unless you buy a very high end bakery cake, it’s usually not all that good. I’m guessing this is because they skimp on the ingredients. And cake mixes? We made some cupcakes from a mix a few months back, and although there was nothing exactly wrong with it, it wasn’t really anything wonderful - not as wonderful as cake should be. And canned frosting - forget about it.
I used to bake sometimes when I was a teen, back when I had a family to help eat the results and a well equipped kitchen, so I am not afraid of the process. So when Mal’s birthday came around last weekend, the first birthday that we actually celebrated much (hubby provides a near constant influx of new toys, so Mal’s not exactly deprived for lack of birthday presents), I wanted to make a home-made cake.
I decided on a Devil’s Food cake from a recipe in the joy of cooking, 9 inch round, two layers, cream cheese frosting. Most real shortening cakes require two parallel streams of prep because you separate the eggs and fold in the whites at the end. This cake had three streams because I was using baking chocolate.
I was slow and careful, and happy with the results. I liked it, and everyone had seconds, so I think it was well received. There were, however, some textural irregularities - small chewy bits in the cake. I’m sure they were not eggshells. I think they were small pockets of unmixed in beaten egg-white. It’s been a long time since I’ve folded egg-whites into cake batter and I was overcautious. It was hard for me to imagine how I could get all the whites uniformly mixed in without losing their foam. So I stopped a little short of complete mixing, hoping the tiny bits of meringue here and there would disappear during baking. I guess they didn’t. Anyone have any advice on “folding?”
One thing about cooking, you sometimes just can’t get exactly what you want unless you make it yourself. Cakes in particular are this way. Unless you buy a very high end bakery cake, it’s usually not all that good. I’m guessing this is because they skimp on the ingredients. And cake mixes? We made some cupcakes from a mix a few months back, and although there was nothing exactly wrong with it, it wasn’t really anything wonderful - not as wonderful as cake should be. And canned frosting - forget about it.
I used to bake sometimes when I was a teen, back when I had a family to help eat the results and a well equipped kitchen, so I am not afraid of the process. So when Mal’s birthday came around last weekend, the first birthday that we actually celebrated much (hubby provides a near constant influx of new toys, so Mal’s not exactly deprived for lack of birthday presents), I wanted to make a home-made cake.
I decided on a Devil’s Food cake from a recipe in the joy of cooking, 9 inch round, two layers, cream cheese frosting. Most real shortening cakes require two parallel streams of prep because you separate the eggs and fold in the whites at the end. This cake had three streams because I was using baking chocolate.
I was slow and careful, and happy with the results. I liked it, and everyone had seconds, so I think it was well received. There were, however, some textural irregularities - small chewy bits in the cake. I’m sure they were not eggshells. I think they were small pockets of unmixed in beaten egg-white. It’s been a long time since I’ve folded egg-whites into cake batter and I was overcautious. It was hard for me to imagine how I could get all the whites uniformly mixed in without losing their foam. So I stopped a little short of complete mixing, hoping the tiny bits of meringue here and there would disappear during baking. I guess they didn’t. Anyone have any advice on “folding?”