All About Cake: A Milk Bar Cookbook

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Even without being beaten to a foam, Eggs implicitly aid leavening in your recipes - they provide hydration which turns to steam during baking - this is a primary way a cake lifts! As well as this, the proteins coagulate (harden) as they are heated and form a strong network with gluten, so they effectively 'support' themselves during a bake.

These are normally a mixture of bicarbonate of soda and another acid-acting chemical, like cream of tartar. Very often, though, one needs far less raising power than these mixtures give – which explains why some recipes require bicarbonate of soda on its own. FatsThere is also a section on warm cakes including those cooked in a mug or in a slow cooker. Several interesting cupcake recipes like key lime or chocolate hazelnut banana. Layer cakes and cake truffles (chocolate chip passion fruit is one example) are included. The get fancy layer cake section includes cakes with 6-7 different separate recipes.

Cakes lend themselves to limitless variations depending on the proportion of their ingredients, the way they are mixed, flavorings added to the basic ingredients, the shapes of the pans used in baking, and cooling and storing methods.Any number of fillings, frosting and final decorations can be chosen to make every cake unique and an artistic expression of its maker.Even without being beaten to a foam, Eggs implicitly aid leavening - they provide hydration. As well as this, the proteins coagulate (harden) as they are heated and form a strong network with gluten, so they effectively 'support' themselves during a bake. More fat, whether in the form of cream, yolks or butter, gives you a finer crumb and slightly less rise The last time (well, the only time) I made a 6"-layer cake, I used several 6" round cake pans. This is not the case with a Tosi cake -- she relies on a jelly roll sized pan to bake the cake on. Once baked and cooled you use your cake ring to cut out the layers -- two perfect rounds and one "round" that is cobbled together with pieces. As you can see in my picture, I got 2 whole rounds and two 1/2 rounds. The benefit to baking the cake like this is that you get really even layers, unlike the domed rounds you get when you bake a cake layer in a round cake pan. Not having to level anything out is a huge plus! (If you're wondering what you do with the extra cake you cake eat it or make cake truffles with it -- the recipe for which are in the book). Later, during the post-war boom, other American companies (notably General Mills) developed this idea further, marketing cake mix on the principle of convenience, especially to housewives. When sales dropped heavily in the 1950s, marketers discovered that baking cakes, once a task at which housewives could exercise skill and creativity, had become dispiriting. This was a period in American ideological history when women, retired from the war-time labor force, were confined to the domestic sphere while still exposed to the blossoming consumerism in the US. [9] This inspired psychologist Ernest Dichter to find a solution to the cake mix problem in the frosting. [10] Since making the cake was so simple, housewives and other in-home cake makers could expend their creative energy on cake decorating inspired by, among other things, photographs in magazines of elaborately decorated cakes. On those occasions when a raising agent is called for, it is usually more convenient to use self-raising flour since this has a standard amount of raising agent already added to it. From time to time a recipe might need rather more (or less) raising power, in which case plain flour plus the appropriate quantity of baking powder is used. Wholewheat flour