Cake baking – more cake foundations
January 24th, 2012 § 5 Comments
In the last post, I looked in detail at creaming the butter and sugar, the starting point for many cakes. This post follows what happens next – adding the eggs, flour and then baking.
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.
Creaming – the foundation of cake making
January 23rd, 2012 § 3 Comments
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.
We Should Cocoa: Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf
February 25th, 2011 § 6 Comments
As a fan of Katie’s chocolates at Matcha Chocolat, and especially her masala chai caramels, I knew I should enter this month’s We Should Cocoa, the monthly chocolate challenge co-ordinated by Choclette. This month’s challenge was tea with chocolate, a great combination. Unfortunately, I was on holiday for most of this month (I was in Mexico – so not *that* unfortunate), so I needed something I could do at short notice to get in before the deadline.
I would have loved to spend some time on different tea infusions for this, but with limited time, and the need to do this after work, I needed something more straightforward. This tea loaf is a recipe I had bookmarked some time back when going through Paul A Young’s stunning book ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘. It sounded like a potentially overwhelming set of flavours, but also one that really appealed. The recipe calls for a huge amount of crystallised ginger, no fat and lots of ground cardamom. The tea is there to moisten the loaf, and also provide a malted, caramel background to these other flavours.
[Update: Choclette also made this recipe as part of the challenge - read about hers here.]
The recipe is unusual for a cake, as it includes just the tea-soaked fruit, sugar, eggs and flour – no butter or oil is used. However, this is the traditional tea loaf recipe. Tea loaves are an old traditional recipe, and can be called Tea Brack in Ireland, and similar to the Welsh Bara Brith. Irish Tea Brack recipes date from the 1800s, and would seem to be somewhat similar to soda bread, with the leavening from baking powder.
I made very few changes to the original recipe, even though the amount of ginger – 250g – seemed potentially overwhelming. Given the strong flavours, I wanted to try the recipe on its own terms before making changes. I baked this in two small loaf tins rather than one large one, so I could freeze one. I also swapped wholemeal self-raising for white self-raising, as that’s what I had in the cupboard, and I thought it would fit well with the rustic idea of a tea loaf. As this calls for Assam tea, which is a major component of English Breakfast blends, you could probably substitute with your everyday teabag. I used loose leaf Assam to make sure I got the strong and malted flavours Paul described.
I used two different brands of crystallised ginger, because I already had a packet open, and needed to get more to make up the large amount. Both come in large chunks, and I decided to slice the chunks into fairly thin pieces, so that the final cake wouldn’t be overwhelming with chewy lumps of ginger. The softer of the two was Humdinger Traditional Stem Ginger, that came with large sugar crystals on. The Waitrose Cooks Ingredients ginger comes in a cute plastic jar, and is firmer and drier, and cut into more even cubes. That made it easier to slice into pieces, so might be worth bearing in mind if you need to chop ginger finely for another recipe.
The smell of the ginger and raisins soaking was incredibly aromatic, with both the orange and cardamom coming through clearly. Even when baking, you could smell this amazing perfume, along with the chocolate. I was right about the flavours – it’s a really intensely flavoured cake, which sets your mouth buzzing with the ginger. Having said that, I think it works really well – the chocolate comes through, the orange holds its own with the ginger, and the cardamom is just about there in the background. My teaspoons of cardamom were a bit scant, so I probably could have used the full measure. It reminds me a lot of Divine’s orange and ginger dark chocolate – that also has quite a bit of crystallised ginger embedded in the chocolate. So I’d definitely recommend making this, but it’s not for the faint-hearted!
Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf
barely adapted from Paul A Young’s ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘.
- 250g crystallised stem ginger
- 100g raisins
- 75g light brown muscovado sugar
- 2 tsp ground cardamom (about 1 tbsp green cardamom pods)
- zest of 1 orange
- 200ml strong assam tea
- 1 large egg
- 200ml wholemeal self-raising flour
- 100g dark chocolate, chopped into chunks (I used Divine 70%)
Slice the ginger chunks into slices, and combine with the raisins and sugar in a heatproof bowl.
Warm the cardamom pods until fragrant in a dry pan, then cool. Pop the black and brown seeds out of the shells and grind into a powder in a pestle and mortar. (This step is optional – you can buy ready-ground cardamom, or grind the pods without toasting them, but this method will get you the most aromatic powder).
Brew 200ml strong assam tea (1tbsp of loose tea leaves, 200ml boiling water) for 4-5 minutes, and strain over the raisins and ginger. Cover and leave overnight or for about 8 hours. (I prepared the ingredients one evening, poured the tea over the following morning, then made the cake the second evening).
After soaking, the tea should almost all be absorbed, with some syrup where the sugar has dissolved. Don’t remove any liquid, but add 1 beaten egg directly to the fruit and mix in. Mix in the flour, then fold in the chocolate to combine. The texture is very similar to a traditional fruit cake at this stage, fairly stiff but still moist.
Put the mixture into two lined 1lb loaf tins (or one large loaf tin).
Bake for an hour at 160C. Check with a skewer that it is cooked through. Cool for 30 minutes in the tin, then remove and cool completely. Wrap in fresh paper and store in a tin for a day before cutting and eating, on its own or buttered slices.
Birthday cake
February 12th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Chocolate - from iStockphoto
Birthday cakes need to be so many things: celebratory; they need to fulfill the wishes of the birthday boy or girl rather than the baker; and demonstrate an appropriate level of effort. It’s this last one that can give me trouble. While I love to make a cake, and will use any excuse to do so, it sometimes feels odd to create something really elaborate for a work colleague or boss. And besides, I don’t often have the time to go overboard. This is where the chocolate torte comes in.
Chocolate torte is one name for a soft chocolate cake made with ground almonds. Other names are Reine de Saba, or Queen of Sheba cake, or it can simply be referred to as a flourless chocolate cake.
To give some idea of the amount of variation possible, I compiled this table from books I own (oh stop: you didn’t already know I was a geek?):
| Author | Nigella Lawson | Sybil Kapoor | Gordon Ramsay | Alice Medrich | Elizabeth David | Julia Child |
| Book | How to Eat | Taste | Just Desserts | Bittersweet | French Provincial Cooking | Mastering the Art of French Cookery |
| Recipe | Torta alla Gianduja | Catherine’s Chocolate Cake | Dark and Delicious Torte | Queen of Sheba | Reine de Saba | Reine de Saba |
| Butter | 125g | 60g | 100g | 140g | 85g | 110g |
| Chocolate | 100g | 1 cup | 350g | 170g | 110g | 110g |
| Eggs | 6 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 |
| Sugar | 0 | 85g | 200g | 170g | 85g | 150g |
| Flour | 0 | 2 tbsp | 0 | 2 tbsp | 0 | 50g |
| Ground nuts | 100g | 0 | 0 | 70g | 85g | 55g |
| Others | 400g Nutella | Water, brandy, coffee | Brandy, almond essence | Brandy, coffee | Rum, coffee |
As with so many of my chocolate experiments, it began with Alice Medrich’s ‘Bittersweet’. She devotes a chapter to a number of variations on this recipe, and reassures the reader that this is a recipe that will accommodate, even welcome changes. She provides us with that elusive license to create almost infinite experimental variations, and still produce an edible result. There can be few experienced home cooks who don’t read through a recipe and mentally edit it. However, we are often admonished that one really ought to follow a recipe to the letter the first time, so you can understand the starting point. While that remains good advice, the freedom to add your own stamp right away is a great inducement to try this recipe. So here at last is a recipe that you can rearrange and make your own, and still produce something that everyone will be happy to eat – and provides a suitable celebration cake at the same time.
Chocolate torte:
Prepare a 20cm/8 inch springform or loose-bottomed tin, by lining the base with baking parchment.
150g dark chocolate (I used 64% Valrhona Manjari)
150g butter
–> melt together, and stir until smooth
1 cup espresso (I used about 1/2 tbsp instant espresso powder in enough water to just dissolve it)
2 tbsp brandy
–> mix into melted chocolate, and set aside
100g ground almonds
45g flour
–> measure and mix together
4 large eggs
–> separate into yolks and whites. If you have a stand mixer, use that bowl for the whites.
110g sugar
–> combine with the yolks and beat until well blended (you can do this by hand, or briefly with a machine)
–> stir in the melted chocolate to combine.
–> separately, whisk the egg whites to soft peaks
50g sugar
–> whisk in 50g sugar to make a meringue, and continue whisking until you have stiff peaks.
–> Fold the whites into the chocolate mixture, by first adding one-quarter, and thoroughly beating it in, then folding in the remainder.
–> Bake for around 30 minutes at 190C/375F, or until a skewer inserted about 4cm from the edge comes out clean, but one inserted in the centre is still gooey.
