Posts
So we have done a cake & some basics are obvious.
If property is about location, location, location then cake is about ingredients, ingredients, ingredients. Butter, free range eggs, real vanilla, only the best ingredients will give you the best cakes.Silk purses & Mrs Pigs ears but it is magnificently easy to find and buy the best. We live in an age of food wealth & profusion .
Commerce & capitalism has created a situation where food is better, cheaper and more available than any-time in history.Best ingredients are cost but because Government is "helping" some things cost more than they ought.
The very best, freshest, sweetest eggs you can have are either your own hens' if you have the space to let them graze and pick or those bought from a farm that sells some surplus. Thousands of farmers wives used to sell lovely eggs BEFORE the EU in the drive to regulate. inspect, prevent & persecute them out of business. You still might be lucky enough to find one but don't tell the Vampires of Brussels.Why the eggs in the fridge, everyone else says room temperature for all ingredients? The cold egg stiffens the butter making for a better mixture, works for me!
Perfectly good butter is being sold own brand by supermarkets BUT would be up to half its current price but for the utter daftness of the CAP. Enough politics back to cake!
Vanilla is expensive, The only orchid we use for food, the seed pods have a labour intensive 6 month fermenting process before they taste "vanilla". Yet it has come down in price & is more available: I find Nielsen & Massey cheapest and best, sitting on the shelves in Dunne's, Superquinn & most of the others. They do a lovely vanilla syrup with the seeds in it, use at the same rate. Nothing compares to real vanilla, the synthetic is disgusting but the demand for vanillin,the main flavour, is so high that synthesis pays though whether it paid the Japanese scientist who found away to extract vanilla from cow dung I do not know. I'm sticking to Nielsen's and Masseys!
Flour is sold fresh, dry and lovely and in quantities that would astonish a citizen of any other century. Lidl & Aldi do not include raising agents in their own plain flours, everyone else does so just up the baking powder 25% if you buy flour there. Plain or cream flour is what you are looking for: low in gluten.
Eggs go stale, flour dies, make sure you bake with fresh ingredients. No matter how well you buy storing badly will ruin your ingredients. Dry cool is always good, away from strong smells & flavours helps. Don't bung the garlic in the flour press!
Last post did pound cake. For a simple, lovely variation scatter a punnet of frozen raspberries on top just before you put the cake in the oven. Some will break up as you manhandle their brittle frozenness The berries will randomly sink, dotting the cake with their tart loveliness. Takes a little longer to bake, freezes beautifully & looks gorgeous as it tastes. I make it in a 12"x13" roasting dish.
Two cakes up and only started!
If property is about location, location, location then cake is about ingredients, ingredients, ingredients. Butter, free range eggs, real vanilla, only the best ingredients will give you the best cakes.Silk purses & Mrs Pigs ears but it is magnificently easy to find and buy the best. We live in an age of food wealth & profusion .
Commerce & capitalism has created a situation where food is better, cheaper and more available than any-time in history.Best ingredients are cost but because Government is "helping" some things cost more than they ought.
The very best, freshest, sweetest eggs you can have are either your own hens' if you have the space to let them graze and pick or those bought from a farm that sells some surplus. Thousands of farmers wives used to sell lovely eggs BEFORE the EU in the drive to regulate. inspect, prevent & persecute them out of business. You still might be lucky enough to find one but don't tell the Vampires of Brussels.Why the eggs in the fridge, everyone else says room temperature for all ingredients? The cold egg stiffens the butter making for a better mixture, works for me!
Perfectly good butter is being sold own brand by supermarkets BUT would be up to half its current price but for the utter daftness of the CAP. Enough politics back to cake!
Vanilla is expensive, The only orchid we use for food, the seed pods have a labour intensive 6 month fermenting process before they taste "vanilla". Yet it has come down in price & is more available: I find Nielsen & Massey cheapest and best, sitting on the shelves in Dunne's, Superquinn & most of the others. They do a lovely vanilla syrup with the seeds in it, use at the same rate. Nothing compares to real vanilla, the synthetic is disgusting but the demand for vanillin,the main flavour, is so high that synthesis pays though whether it paid the Japanese scientist who found away to extract vanilla from cow dung I do not know. I'm sticking to Nielsen's and Masseys!
Flour is sold fresh, dry and lovely and in quantities that would astonish a citizen of any other century. Lidl & Aldi do not include raising agents in their own plain flours, everyone else does so just up the baking powder 25% if you buy flour there. Plain or cream flour is what you are looking for: low in gluten.
Eggs go stale, flour dies, make sure you bake with fresh ingredients. No matter how well you buy storing badly will ruin your ingredients. Dry cool is always good, away from strong smells & flavours helps. Don't bung the garlic in the flour press!
Last post did pound cake. For a simple, lovely variation scatter a punnet of frozen raspberries on top just before you put the cake in the oven. Some will break up as you manhandle their brittle frozenness The berries will randomly sink, dotting the cake with their tart loveliness. Takes a little longer to bake, freezes beautifully & looks gorgeous as it tastes. I make it in a 12"x13" roasting dish.
Two cakes up and only started!
