Cakes!

Tuesday we made Devil's Food Cake, Almond Cake, Carrot Cake, and Chiffon Cake.

Chiffon Cake:

This uses the Chiffon method. Sift together cake flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. Combine oil, yolks, water, and extract - whisk. Making a well in the center of the dry ingredients, add wet ingredients and stir well, without over-mixing. Stir in lemon zest (if using). Whip egg whites to soft peaks; add in sugar and cream of tartar and continue whipping to form firm, moist peaks. Fold meringue into cake batter. Pour into parchment lined, ungreased 2 8" cake pans, filling only 2/3 of the way. When done baking, line rack with parchment, place on top of cake, and flip over - this flattens top and it won't sink further.

You'll see what we do with this in the next post...

Devil's Food Cake:

Mmmmm. Devil's food cake. This. Was. Amazing. Use the creaming method (you know what that is by now, right?). The most important step for this one is not to overmix once you've added the cocoa paste (which is just warm water and cocoa powder - nothing fancy). Don't worry if some of the flour isn't completely mixed in - scrape it down and stop the mixer. Use parchment and spray sides and bottom. Don't you wish you could have been there to smell this? I am not a huge chocolate person, but I think I could have just sat in a room filled with this smell.

Almond Cake:
Creaming method. If it starts to break when adding the eggs, just add a tiny bit of flour. Once all 12 eggs have been added (in three batches), fold in dry ingredients. Parchment line and spray pans. Spread with an offset spatula and pinch edge away from pan. Ha. This one was clearly too thin on one edge - I gave it to Master to work with, because if I do three out of four cakes, why should I get stuck with the burned one? Especially when she is very open that she doesn't care.

Carrot Cake:

This uses the two-step method - mix wet, mix dry, then mix together. Pretty simple. Irish says she has a much better recipe, but this tasted pretty good to me. Apparently her's has pineapple in it.

Lessons Learned:

Oh my goodness does chocolate cake smell amazing. And I like baking cakes! I really think I am going to have to go out and buy myself these different flours - I tried to make chocolate chip cookies at home but only using all-purpose, and they definitely did not turn out as well as the batch I made in class. Now, I also have a sucky 2/3 oven, but still. And I really want a kitchen-aid. But that's silly until I have an actual kitchen.