In the last post, I talked about shaping buns and rolls. In this one, I thought I would review some of the components of a great fruited bun recipe.

I like buns, I have a stash of home-made hot cross ones in the freezer at the moment, and I think, like Azelia, that you can make them all year around, not just for Easter. All you need to do is leave off the cross, and have them for breakfast, a mid-morning snack, afternoon tea or something to finish the day when you get in late.

Before chemical leaveners, like baking powder and bicarbonate of soda became available, a bit of yeasted bread, perhaps with extra butter and sugar added to it, and some currants thrown in, was what a cake was made of. Eliza Acton’s book ‘Modern Cookery for Private families’ , first published in 1845, featured many more yeast-risen buns and cakes than butter and sugar ones. Before sugar became inexpensive and easy to buy, adding dried fruit to bread was a good way to add sweetness. You can find these ancestors of modern cakes in every part of Britain. The Irish Barm Brack, Welsh Bara Brith and Scotch Black Bun were all based, at least originally, on a yeasted fruit bread. Some of these developed into tea breads and tea bracks, where cold tea was used to soak the fruit, and the whole mixed with flour and an egg to make a soft sliceable loaf.

Azelia’s Dairy Free conversion and notes on the same recipe

and if you don’t want fruit you can always try:

Nordic Cinnamon buns from Nordic Bakery

Debs’ Hot Choc Buns

References

1. Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery is a comprehensive look at all sorts of breadmaking, covering the role of different ingredients, the history, and lots and lots of recipes.
2. Dan Lepard, ‘Short and Sweet‘ is full of all sorts of baking recipes and advice, but has good section on sweet breads, including fruit buns, teacakes and sticky buns.
3. Harold McGee, ‘On Food And Cooking‘ is the bible for finding out exactly what’s happening with your ingredients and recipes

There are many types of bread that you might want to make into rolls. Enriched doughs can make soft white baps or burger buns. Fruited and spiced doughs can make hot cross buns, teacakes or cinnamon rolls.

Getting neat and even shapes for these things can be tricky. Yeasted dough which has just has its first rise can be puffy and uneven.

Going from that lumpy mass to a tray of neat and even shapes can take a little practice.

I recorded some video of making rolls some time ago, and I have now finally got around to editing it together with some instructions to show the steps involved:

In addition to the video, I wrote a few tips that provide some more detail:

• Make sure you dimple and pat the dough down to remove and redistribute the large air bubbles. You don’t need to ‘punch it down’ as some recipes say, but you do want to make the texture of the dough more even so that you can create even shapes out of it. You can also
• Use this process to make a symettrical shape out of the dough which will make it easier to divide into even pieces. This can be a rectangle, a round boule shape or a long stick. You can also weigh the pieces as you cut them off to be sure they are even.
• Try and preserve the skin of the dough when you’re shaping. This is a tip I got from this video of Richard Bertinet with Tim Hayward. The surface of the dough after it has risen is smooth and even. If you can use that surface as the outside edge of all your rolls, it will make it easier to get a smooth surface.
• Start with this smooth section face down for each piece of dough, and draw the edges into the centre to make a ball.
• To tighten the surface of the dough and make a really neat round shape, you should rotate the dough on the work surface. This motion (demonstrated in the video) draws the surface of the dough down, stretching it out and tucking it under at the same time.
• Place the rolls and buns a little distance apart on a baking sheet. When they start to touch, you will know they have risen enough to bake.
• To get really crusty bread, you should start at a high temperature, and then turn down and bake for longer at a low temperature. With rolls you’re usually after a soft texture and thin crust, so bake at a fairly hot temperature – 200C or so – and don’t overbake or the crust will start to dry out. Little buns might need only 10 minutes; larger burger buns more like 20 minutes.

A few interesting articles, projects and products I’ve come across recently – you might have already seen some of these if you follow me on twitter or pinterest:

• There seems to be a fashion for creating Pantone versions of foods at the moment – there are these tarts and these Easter eggs.
• I got the Penguin The Great Food Box Set for Christmas. They are little paperback books with beautifully designed covered from a series of great food authors. I’ve just finished ‘Eating with the Pilgrims and Other Pieces‘, by Calvin Trillin. If you like Jeffrey Steingarten or even Tim Hayward, you might like this little book too.
• Michael Laiskonis organised a special dinner, cooked entirely by pastry chefs, called ‘Killed by Dessert‘. The menu sounds amazing, and you can also see photos from the dinner taken by Shuna Fish Lydon (a.k.a. eggbeater).
• Following my post on miso, there’s a great post here about making your own dashi.
• The next post is going to be about buns. Dan Lepard did a great post for the BBC Food blog on how sweetened, enriched dough works with the yeast, and how to ensure success with your Hot Cross Buns.
• A couple of recent posts about food writing: this article in the New York Times about what it’s like to be a ghostwriter for a chef’s cookbook; and a recent one from Amanda Hesser, who used to work at the New York Times as a food writer, on her advice for aspiring writers. The interesting thing about Amanda’s article is that she advises not making food writing the only thing you do – she says you need to combine it with other things, as it just doesn’t pay enough on its own any more.

Back soon with a proper post.

Never mind Mrs Beeton, Eliza Acton was the real force behind the modernisation and codification of the English Victorian kitchen. In fact, she moans in the preface to the revised version of her book, ‘Modern Cookery for private families’ that many people have been stealing her recipes, and she has taken great pains to note where the recipe is original to the Author, so that people may know these have been stolen from her when they appear in other texts. This is a not-so-oblique reference to Mrs Beeton, and others, who took her recipes for their own text. At more than 600 closely-typed pages, it is a comprehensive work, although unlike Mrs Beeton’s volume, it is restricted to cooking, and doesn’t deal with other areas of household economy like illnesses and servants.

She was among the first to list ingredients separately to the method, and to give reasonably clear instructions of how to make the dishes, without assuming very much previous knowledge of the cook. She apologises that the detailed explanations and observations she has given for each recipe mean that she can’t fit in as many recipes as other books can. Despite this, she fits in hundreds of recipes in the 34 chapters of the book, covering areas as diverse as Forcemeats, Curries, Pickles, Confectionary and Bread. In my calendar of cookbooks for this year, February’s allocation was Eliza Acton’s ‘Modern Cookery for Private Families’, first published in 1845, and reprinted by Quadrille as one of their ‘Classic Voices in Food’. Although one thing and another means I haven’t made anything from it yet, I’ve enjoyed browsing through it, and thought I would share some of my impressions.

Victorians had some funny ideas about health and eating, but Eliza Acton was ahead of her time in many respects. She thought home-prepared food that was nourishing was essential to be productive at work and to build health. She didn’t like the adulteration that was so common in those decades, and thought it important that every household knew how to prepare simple, economical dishes, rather than having to buy them in. She liked French cooking, plain English dishes, Indian curries, Jewish meals and included recipes for them all.

Although the popular caricature of Victorian cooking is a passion for boiling vegetables until they are thoroughly soft to make them more digestible, Eliza Acton does not seem to advocate boiling everything to death. She is often at pains to say that meat should be heated very gently. A recipe for buttered carrots advises that the carrots can be sliced and then boiled, or cooked whole before being sliced – the latter being the slower method, but the one that best preserves the flavour. I am intrigued to try this method.

Lemons are threaded throughout the book’s recipes, often added to butters and sauces, as well as zest being used in forcemeats and wherever breadcrumbs are needed. Likewise, herbs, particularly chopped parsley, are often used in quantity. This gives an impression of a much livelier cuisine that we are used to thinking of. It perhaps also conveys some of the French sensibility which was thought of as the height of sophisticated cuisine, and which Eliza observed first-hand while living in France.

Breadcrumbs are employed all over the place. A delicious sounding recipe for roast chicken calls for the bird to be stuffed with a basic forcemeat (flavoured breadcrumbs), then drizzled with butter and coated with breadcrumbs. This sounds like an early version of crispy fried chicken. She notes that gravy should not be poured over the bird when it is prepared in this way – too right.

Forcemeats play an important role in many recipes. I always thought of these as being based on sausagemeat or pork, but of course, it just means stuffing. The most basic versions in the book contain simply breadcrumbs, lemon zest, butter, and herbs. Some add pounded ham, oysters or mushrooms.

An absence I noted is that there are very few recipes for minced meats. Modern cookery handbooks would lean heavily on the packet of minced beef to produce pies, chillis, pasta sauce and so forth. The only recipe for minced beef appears to be those for ‘collops’, where it is cooked in a little gravy. There is a leftover beef pie, where the cooked meat (“that which is least done is best for the purpose”) is chopped, seasoned, mixed with gravy and topped with an “inch-thick layer of bread-crumbs” moistened with plenty of clarified butter. Sounds pretty good, and not unlike a cottage pie.

The thing I found odd when looking through the text was that there were relatively few recipes for cakes compared to modern texts. Perhaps not too surprising given that sugar was only just becoming affordable for everyday use. There was a major tradition of puddings, and of yeasted buns and breads with dried fruit. But cakes as we think of them don’t have much space devoted to them.

Cakes like fruit cake or Dundee cake that we think of as being very old English recipes are actually more recent. They rely on imported sugar, being produced in Caribbean plantations by slaves, as well as imported dried fruits and spices that would be unloaded at docks like those in London where you can still find traces of those imports in the street names.

A pound cake made with huge quantities of butter and eggs as well as sugar, and with a great deal of manual labour, was a real luxury product. Imagine making a fruit cake where you had to remove seeds and stalks, and wash and dry the raisins. Where you had to break down the sugar loaf into a powder before you could combine it. Where you might want to dry the flour out in a low oven to ensure it wasn’t carrying a lot of water that might throw off the weight. The amount of effort needed, never mind the cost, made sure this was firmly into special treat territory.

I wanted to make some spiced, fruited buns from Eliza Acton, but her recipe is so completely vague, it seemed impossible. In the end, I went instead for Elizabeth David’s in ‘English Bread and Yeast Cookery‘. The results from that are coming in another post soon.

Updated: now with links updated

You can do so many things with even a small amount of egg white. As they are the best ingredient for capturing air, you can expand even a single egg white into a bowlful of foam. There’s nothing much to egg whites – they are just water plus some proteins. The part that makes them so useful is the properties of the protein. After it has uncoiled a little, it forms a network that traps air bubbles really well.

Keeping egg whites

Very few people outside the catering and restaurant industry seem to know how stable egg whites are. If you separate eggs and use the yolks, you can put the whites into a clean container, cover with cling film and store in the fridge for weeks, even months. You can also freeze them without any problem. Just be sure to defrost them carefully – you can easily cook them by accident if you microwave frozen egg whites!

Working with egg whites

There are a lot of legends surrounding egg whites. You do need to keep any fat away from them if you want to whip them up. That means that glass and metal bowls are best – plastic ones aren’t a good idea. Things that help: a little bit of acid works well – a couple of drops of lemon juice, or a pinch of cream of tartar. If you don’t do these things, the egg whites will still increase in volume, but won’t reach quite the same heights of stiff peaks.

Many recipes with whisked egg whites require stiff peaks. If you whisk too far, however, the egg whites will break up into little lumps as you fold them into something else. Both the acid and copper, if you use a copper bowl, will create a stable foam that takes longer to reach this pebbly stage.

When working egg whites into a thick batter, like a cake batter, you can use a portion of the egg whites to loosen the batter first. Just take a large spoonful of the egg whites and stir into the batter without worrying about the air. The liquid in the egg whites will loosen the batter enough to make it easier to fold in the rest and preserve the

Meringues

Adding sugar to egg whites stabilises the foam. Once sugar has been added to a meringue mixture, you can beat it for a long time, and it will just get stiffer. If you’re piping the meringue, or adding other ingredients (such as ground almonds for macarons de Paris), you want the mixture to be as stiff as possible so it will hold up when the other ingredients are mixed in. Meringues can be spooned or piped onto parchment paper for baking.

Meringues are intensely sweet, so it is nice to add a bitter or toasted flavour to contrast with it. Toasted nuts and caramel create complicated, toasted flavours that can make the perception of sweetness less acute, by making it less simple.
Coffee and brown sugar meringues temper the sweetness of white sugar. Adding a thick bland filling based on true buttercream, or perhaps on barely sweetened whipped cream, will also contrast with the sweet meringue.
I like an Alice Medrich recipe that combines dark chocolate, ground in a food processor, with stiff meringue. These are piped in small peaks and baked to give a crisp meringue cookie, with bursts of chocolate flavour.

Macarons

Ms Humble has the best guide to macaron making – in a series of completely comprehensive posts, she goes through every possible hint and tip you could know about. (She also has awesome science cookies posts).
In my own experience, it can be hard to get the ideal shape and texture, but almost every macaron is worth eating, even those that don’t look too beautiful.

You need to make a really thick meringue mixture, so it will hold after folding in the almonds, and while you’re piping. However, too much air will mean a more grainy surface and you won’t get such a smooth skin forming on the surface. You need to dry them a little before they are baked to get that smooth skin. Ms Humble has lots of ideas about the much harder task of getting something that’s crisp on the ouside, soft on the inside, and neither hollow nor sticking to the sheet.

(Below are a pistachio macaron from Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester on the left, and my attempt on the right).

Coconut macaroons are much easier – you make a stiff mixture with them, cooking the mixture a little in the saucepan before spooning onto a baking sheet. Here, the sticking power of the protein is much more important than its foaming properties. David Lebovitz has a nice recipe for coconut macaroons.

It’s very seldom that you achieve the platonic ideal of stock. There is an idea of a clear, golden liquid that conveys many layered savoury depths, and brings a touch of magic wherever you use it,

Reams of cookery writers have written hymns to the power of stock. Anyone trained in the traditions of French cooking, from Joel Robuchon to Michael Ruhlman, will have learnt all about stock as the absolute foundation of French cuisine, the essential component of all meat cookery at least. But even home cooks like Nigella Lawson are converts to this idea.

I fall somewhere in between. I hate food waste, so the idea of extracting every last drop of flavour and nourishment from a chicken carcass really appeals to me. I follow Nigella’s suggestion of freezing chicken bones, and when I have two or three chickens worth, I put them all in a large pot of cold water, bring it to the boil, simmer for about an hour and a half, then add chopped onions, carrots, a stick or two of celery, a few peppercorns and bits of thyme and parsley if I have them around, and simmer for a further hour.

What this produces is fairly flavourful and good for soups and risottos. But it’s not what you think of as beautiful stock – the clear, golden liquid you might see in a consomme or tortellini in brodo.

I know that you should keep stock bubbling very slowly, but the importance of how slow this should be didn’t really sink in until I made ham stock for Heston’s pea and ham soup, using the recipe in Heston Blumenthal at Home. The recipe suggests that you cover the ham with water, add onions, carrots and leeks, bring to a simmer, then place in an 85C oven for 5 hours. This very slow, long cooking produces a liquid that stays well below boiling for the entire duration but still extracts deep flavours.

When I took the ham out of the oven after this 5 hour stint, the liquid was so clear I could see all the way to the bottom of the pot. It helped that, to ensure the gammon wasn’t too salty, I had brought it to the boil, poured the water away, and then cover it with fresh water to make the stock. This helped remove the scum and bits of floating protein that will always accumulate when you boil raw meat.

A few days later, I rescued the bones from two especially fat pheasants we ate pot-roasted for New Year’s Eve from the freezer, and made stock from them. After the ham experience, I took the lid off, and after bringing it to the boil, kept the heat as low as possible. You can see the cooking in the (rather noisy) video below. It was barely possible to see a single bubble over the course of a minute. The reward for this was a beautiful, clear golden stock. I think this calls for a risotto.

Using stock

To really show off your stock, make risotto – this really captures the flavour you’ve painstakingly brought in. It also makes great soups (although water will almost always do, especially for vegetable soups), provides liquid for curries, gravy, bolognese sauces. If you’re going to make stock regularly (and if you eat roast chicken, it’s not difficult), don’t be precious about it. Use it whenever you see the opportunity. It’s silly to wait for a perfect risotto to use your stock, when you could use it to improve things, even just a little, throughout the week.

Making good stock

• You don’t need the very best ingredients, but neither should you use only compost materials. Make sure the vegetables are clean, and that most of the skin and fat have been removed from the bones.
• Stock is all about long and slow. Doing this in the oven is easier, but requires you to have an ovenproof pot with a lid big enough to make this work. Chicken bones want at least two hours, preferably three.
• Either keep the vegetables in large pieces, and add them at the start, or chop them into chunks and add to the pot with an hour to go.
• Strain through a fine sieve, or layer of damp cheesecloth to remove any particles. This also means you can add herbs and peppercorns straight to the pot without tieing them into a bundle.
• Don’t season your stock. You might want to reduce it, so only add salt when you use the stock, not when you make it.
• Reducing the stock will concentrate the flavour and make it easier to store. After you have strained it, pour back into a clean pot and boil fast to drive off water.
• Stock freezes really well – it’s the best way to store it. Use either strong freezer bags, or rigid takeaway soup containers. With freezer bags, you can easily get small holes once the bag is frozen, so be sure to defrost it in a container, in case the bag leaks.

Miso is a fermented paste that is an essential part of Japanese cooking, but has also started to show up in recipes for everything from roast pork to soup to butterscotch sauce. I started reading about miso, and then picked up the bag of shiro (white) miso in the picture from The Japan Centre.  If you’ve had miso soup from somewhere like Wagamama, or even Pret, you have an idea of the sort of savoury flavour that comes from miso.

Making miso

While reading up about soy sauce, I came across this interesting idea:

“soy sauce and miso paste were originally the same
preparation, but the liquid became soy sauce, and the solids
left behind became miso”

Miso and soy sauce are both produced by fermentation. Miso can be produced by many different grains, but the most popular types are produced by soybeans with rice and/or barley, and some rice colonised by an Aspergillus fungus, called Koji.

Miso is has both savoury and sweet aspects. Both of these elements come about because the fermentation creates enzymes that break down both the starches and proteins in the soy and rice grains. Breaking down starch produces sugars, (starch is just the name for a long chain of sugar molecules joined together). Breaking down proteins produces amino acids for the same reason. Glutamate is the amino acid which creates the taste of umami.

Cooking with miso

As I read more and more about miso, it became clear that there are a huge number of different types of miso, all with different characteristics. Still, the ones you are most likely to find easily in the UK are shiro miso, or white miso – a pale, fairly sweet miso; and aka miso or red miso, a more savoury and stronger paste. Both of these can be used to make miso soup, by combining them with dashi, a savoury stock made from dried kelp and dried bonito (tuna) flakes.

However, the sweet-savoury nature of miso makes it much more versatile. The current issue of Lucky Peach, an American food quarterly, includes a recipe for burnt miso butterscotch sauce and for miso mayonnaise. (You have to love a magazine that entitles an article on different types of miso paste ‘Miso Horny’. And if you don’t love that, then Lucky Peach is probably not the publication for you.)

You can use it to enhance the flavour of soup, to glaze steak or pork, to marinade salmon, or in salad dressing. It’s a flavour enhancer, which makes it very versatile. I’ll be trying to use more of it this year.

The recipe I started with was Smitten Kitchen’s Carrot and Miso soup. You can head over to her site for the details, but a summary of what I did is below. This is a great way to introduce yourself to miso. The carrot soup is fine without the miso, but with it you get a rounder flavour that brings together the sweet and vegetal tastes of the carrots.

Carrot and miso soup

• Chop two small onions, a couple of garlic cloves and about 10 medium carrots.
• Cook gently in olive oil until the onion is translucent.
• Add a thumb-sized piece of ginger, chopped finely. Submerge everything in about a litre of Marigold vegetable bouillon (made weak so it’s not too salty). Simmer until the carrots are soft.
• Blend in the pan with an immersion blender.
• Take a ladleful of the pureed soup out into a small bowl, and mix in a couple of tablespoons of white miso. As soon as you mix the miso with the hot soup, you get a burst of that miso soup smell. Mix the soup back in and taste. If it needs more miso, repeat this procedure.
• Serve with a few dots of toasted sesame oil on top.

Our very first was Tatties and The Wedding Singer. Later came Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Finding Nemo, Lord of the Rings, every Harry Potter. Dinner and a movie has been part of our date vocabulary forever. The food has sometimes been bad, but chains like Wagamama, Busaba Eathai and Byron Burgers have ameliorated that. More often it has been rushed.

So when I heard about a new venture, allowing you to eat good food in the cinema, I was interested. As it combines Rowley Leigh’s Bayswater restaurant, Le Cafe Anglais, with the Odeon cinema at the other end of Whiteleys shopping centre, I knew we had to try it.

The concept is pretty simple (and they do like to call it a concept). They have converted several screens into luxury cinemas, with wide aisles, reclining leather armchairs, and digital projectors. Outside is a bar and lounge area, where you can order food and drinks from a specially designed menu. The clever part is that you can also order from this same menu once inside the cinema, by pressing an airline-style call button in the arm of your chair. The menu has been designed in ‘finger’ and ‘fork’ sections, so there’s no need for a lap tray or knife and fork.

We ordered drinks in the bar, and attempted to order food before being told that if we ordered in the bar, it would arrive there. If we wanted food served in the cinema, we should wait and order inside. This we did, and after having the ‘concept’ explained, and playing with the chairs a bit, we ordered a porchetta sandwich with fennel and apple, a side of chips, a venison chilli, and a lemon tart for afters.

These arrived towards the end of the trailers, and were very good. The porchetta sandwich was savoury, and came with a strip of crisp crackling, though the salty pork and mayonnaise rather drowned out any fennel and apple. Some crisp cabbage might have improved it. The chips were crisp and brown and the venison chilli was pronounced good, but rich. The lemon tart was smooth and delicious, though the firm shortbread base made it hard to tackle quietly, and it came with yet more crispy bits – shreds of lemon peel.

All of this is obviously not cheap. A cinema ticket is £18, whilst menu items range from £7.50 for penne with broccoli to £14.50 for the ‘Royale’ – a beef fillet in a bun. We paid £45 in all, including £10 for drinks.

However, when compared with the real competition, it’s not at all bad either. Le Cafe Anglais is a very fine restaurant, and the two-course set menu is £20 per head. The Electric Cinema, just up the road in Notting Hill, has leather chairs as well, and a bar at the back, and charges £15 per ticket (or £32 for a two seater sofa). Vue have ‘luxury’ cinema options as well: Scene, with its own bar, comes in at £17.15 at Westfield.

There are niggles. My porchetta was somewhat over-salted. Deep-fried tortilla bowls, crisp chips and firm shortbread bases for tarts all seem foolish things to serve in a cinema where they will crunch, or you will need to use implements to tackle them. They don’t quite have the service worked out yet – it should really be possible to transfer your drinks tab to your seat in the cinema, instead of settling up twice.

But anywhere that offers huge, reclining seats, good food, and the luxury of taking your time to eat it, gets my vote as a date destination.

I found a great description of what happens in a cake in Rose Levy Berenbaum’s Cake Bible:

“Ingredients fall into two categories: those that form and strengthen the cake structure and those that weaken it”.

The flour and eggs provide the protein that holds the cake structure up, and stop it from collapsing into a pancake. The fat, sugar and leavening all weaken the structure in different ways, making the cake tender and soft instead of tough and chewy. The balance between the two sides is important for capturing the air that makes cakes soft and light.

Adding eggs – what happens when it curdles

Almost as soon as I put the last post up, someone asked what happens if the mixture curdles. I have looked into this problem before – most people seem to say it can be avoided, perhaps marginally reduces the volume of the final cake, but if it does happen, you can carry on without problems.

But what was unclear was what caused it to curdle in the first place – was it really not enough creaming, or something else?

When the mixture curdles, what you see appearing are lumps of fat and sugar, surrounded by a thin watery liquid. The clearest explanation I found came from Shirley Corriher in ‘Bakewise’. She describes this as a:

“switch from the the water-in-oil emulsion that you want to an oil-in-water emulsion”.

This probably only makes sense if you know what an emulsion is. An emulsion is simply one liquid suspended in another. In this case, when you start to add the eggs, you are aiming for little droplets of the water from the eggs, suspended through the fat-and-sugar mixture that is already there. At some point, the liquid from the eggs can overwhelm the amount of fat, causing the bubbles of water to all join up and become the main part of the mixture – the continuous phase, as it’s called.

To prevent this happening, you need to ensure that the fat and sugar are able to hold as much liquid as possible – which means soft, but not melted. You also need to add the egg very gradually, so that it doesn’t overwhelm the mixture. This is the same principle as adding oil to mayonnaise – go slowly and incorporate each bit before you add some more.

Finally, the solution once it has curdled – which it might well do – is to stop beating it and add some flour. This will absorb the excess liquid that’s starting to pool, and shift the balance back again.

Speaking of Shirley Corriher, this is a brilliant excuse to link to my favourite food science programme, Good Eats:
Good Eats: A Cake on Every Plate

Shirley appears at about 4m30 (disturbingly extolling the virtues of cake flour, which you can’t get in the UK because it’s chlorinated, and the EU aren’t big fans of that idea).
Alton also talks about creaming and bubbles at about 8m30. He also has kick-ass flames painted onto his KitchenAid mixer.

Adding flour

Once the eggs are in, the final step is to add the flour, and any liquid that might be called for. These are often added in alternate batches, so that the mixture gets neither too stiff nor too runny as they go in – either might deflate the air.

An often neglected step is to thoroughly sift the flour and baking powder together. This isn’t necessary if using self-raising flour, but when adding baking powder, there is always the risk that small lumps of leavener will persist in the batter, and produce large ugly holes in the final cake. If you really want a fine texture, sift two or three times before it goes into the batter.

The other important thing when you add the flour is to stop folding or stirring as soon as the flour has disappeared into the mixture – don’t mix any more than you need to. As soon as the flour makes contact with the liquid in the eggs, and any added liquid like milk, it will start to make gluten. The more you mix at this point, the longer and stronger the gluten will become, and the tougher your cake will be.

Baking

The final point is on baking. The balance here is between allowing the leavener time to work and expand, and setting the egg and flour proteins in a structure that will hold the air. Bake at too high a heat, and the leavener might not have had time to work before the batter sets, making a more dense cake with a closer texture. Bake at too low a temperature, and the gas might bubble to the surface and disperse, and so be lost that way. A medium temperature will set the batter at the right point, and bake through evenly without making the surface too dark and brown.

An alternative method – the two stage approach

When consulting Rose Levy Berenbaum, I discovered that she actually doesn’t recommend creaming at all. Her favoured approach is a different one completely. She combines the flour, sugar and fat together with a little egg, and beats thoroughly to incorporate air. Then she adds the remainder of the egg, and other liquid in batches.

This approach takes a different route to the issues above. By combining the fat directly with the flour, it can be coated to prevent the liquid getting at the protein and forming gluten. The flour-sugar-fat mixture can still hold air, so the creaming still generates volume. And the eggs are added only once the flour is already there to absorb liquid, so there is no risk of curdling.

I haven’t tried this approach more than once or twice, but I will be trying it out alongside regular creaming to see what effect it has. Watch this space.

Cakes are demanding, and learning to make a good cake needs more than a recipe. So many little details are important. One of the essential details, at least for most British cakes, is beating the butter and sugar until truly pale and fluffy – creaming them together. If you’re making a Victoria sponge, a layer cake or a cupcake, you almost always start by creaming together the butter and sugar.

What is creaming?

For a long time I didn’t understand creaming at all. The recipe phrase is usually ‘cream the butter and sugar together, or ‘beat until light and fluffy’ or ‘beat until it turns a shade paler’. The big problem with these directions is that they don’t convey the change you need to see. You start off with a greasy paste of butter and sugar, but end up with something more like slightly yellowed whipped cream instead of butter.

I only really got creaming when watching a demonstration by Alice Medrich, an American baker and chocolatier. She was making her Tribute cake, a layer cake of featherlight chocolate sponge with whipped chocolate ganache filling and a smooth, shiny chocolate glaze. She left the mixer running for a good five minutes when creaming the butter and sugar – much longer than I had expected.

Think about it this way instead: most of the frosting that is now applied in towering heaps to American cupcakes is made of this same mixture. They tend to use icing sugar instead, so the texture is even smoother, but the volume and the fluffy texture are the things you’re aiming for.

Why is creaming important in making cakes?

The structure of a cupcake is a foam, a web of flour starch and egg proteins, with many tiny bubbles. The batter you end up with is quite delicate, with just enough connection between the ingredients to hold the all-important air in there. This is the biggest difference between a sponge and other types of cake.

Marrying butter and sugar is a task at once completely simple and immensely complicated. It is the foundation of cake bakery, the structure upon which everything else stands. Build it carelessly, and the rest of the structure may wobble and fall. Of course, you can insure yourself against these errors with other supporting structures, but when you want to move on to the virtuoso pieces that really depend on the foundation, that strip everything else back, you will find it hard.

What is happening when you cream together butter and sugar is that the sugar crystals are helping to create bubbles in the fat as they are beaten. Air is what creaming is all about. Beating faster and longer creates more and more bubbles, and creates a finer texture. Any time you introduce bubbles of one thing into something else, it will become more opaque and paler. This is true of vinaigrette, of hollandaise, of whisked egg whites and of creamed butter and sugar. All the little bubbles start to interfere with the light, bouncing it around more and making it look paler.

How do you cream butter and sugar for sponge cakes?

Hannah Glasse in 1774 described the final state as a ‘fine thick cream’. She suggested that using your hand, this should take an hour. Another 19th Century book suggests it is “the hardest part of cake making” and you should have your manservant do it.

In the absence of a man-servant, a handheld electric mixer or a stand mixer like a Kitchenaid makes this much, much easier. With a small quantity it can be done by hand, but expect a decent workout. You need the mixture to change colour – as the air is incorporated, the bubbles make the mixture look paler. The texture also becomes much fluffier.

When you’re creaming butter and sugar together, it’s more or less impossible to mix for too long. You at least need the mixture to become one shade lighter. By mixing it for long enough, it should be possible to make it turn almost white, as the sugar crystals introduce more and more air into the fat. All of this isn’t really conveyed by the simple words ‘cream the butter and sugar’.

In a follow up post, I’ll talk about the subsequent steps in making a sponge cake, which follow on from the creaming step.