LONDON, Ont. - Nothing says party like a cake.
Whether it's a birthday, graduation, retirement, baby shower, fancy dinner, wedding or simply a morning coffee klatch, a cake proclaims it a special occasion. If the cake is homemade, so much the better.
But unlike many other types of cooking, baking is not a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants undertaking. In fact, trying to make a cake without a recipe is "like building a house without a blueprint," says Roland Hofner, a baking professor in the culinary arts program at Fanshawe College in London, Ont., and owner of Cakewalkers, a city bakery specializing in pastries and cakes, especially wedding cakes.
Baking is a very "scientific" process, he explains, in which all the ingredients are building blocks that interact, causing chemical reactions to create the structure of the cake.
But that doesn't mean you have to be a scientist to succeed. Those who develop the recipes have that knowledge, so all a home baker has to do is follow the instructions.
That's why the key to baking is following the recipe to the letter, including measuring properly and adding the ingredients and following the method in the exact order given, Hofner says. "You can drastically change a recipe by switching around the method."
One potential problem is the dual Canadian realities of imperial and metric measures. Hofner believes some of the generally accepted conversions are not precise enough for baking and uses a more exact conversion. Bakers who switch back and forth between the two forms of measurement are just asking for trouble and those who mistakenly equate weight and volume measure are courting disaster.
For example, he says, one cup of all-purpose flour equals about 240 millilitres (volume measure) but weighs 150 to 160 grams (weight measure). One cup of sifted all-purpose flour, however, weighs only about 125 to 135 grams, depending on how much air is incorporated into it. If it's pastry or bread flour, the weight measurements are different again.
But it's easy enough to get around the problem if you are consistent, he says. Choose one method of measurement - weight or volume, imperial or metric - and be consistent with it throughout the recipe.
Substitutions can also cause problems.
"If a recipe calls for all-purpose flour, you have to use all-purpose flour because there's a different amount of protein in flours." Using the wrong kind "may turn (what's supposed to be) a light, tender cake into a very hard, rubbery-like substance because you have too much protein in it, or not enough, and the whole cake's ... going to collapse on you."
Likewise, substituting soft margarine for butter is a mistake because "soft margarine does not have the same content in it. It will not have the ability to cream as well or hold as much of the other ingredients in it and, again, the cake may collapse."
There are two basic kinds of cake - butter and sponge. The base of a butter cake is butter creamed with sugar and it uses baking powder to make it rise. The base of a sponge cake is beaten egg whites combined with sugar and it's the air in the eggs that makes it light and fluffy.
Terminology in a recipe can also create problems for the uninitiated. For example, Hofner says, no matter how hard you beat a butter cake, you can't hurt the batter. But with a sponge cake, if you stir the other ingredients into the egg whites instead of "folding" them gently, you'll stir all the air out of the eggs and the cake will fall.
