Cake

Related Topics:
Cake :: Cake_Like :: Cake_Tops :: Cakes :: Cake_Decorating :: Cake,_Jonathan

A cake is a form of food that is usually sweet and often baked. Cakes normally combine some kind of wheat byproduct, a sweetening agent (commonly sugar), a binding agent (generally egg, though gluten or starch are often used by vegetarians and vegans), fats (usually butter or margarine, although a fruit puree can be substituted to avoid using fat), a liquid (milk, water or fruit juice), flavours and some form of leavening agent (such as yeast or baking powder).

Cake is often the dessert of choice for meals at ceremonial occasions, particularly weddings or birthdays.

Baking a cake

Since cakes are often iced or frosted, the term cake usually refers to the entire finished object: the cake and its frosting (topping). However, cake also refers to the part that is typically made from flour.

Cake baking ingredients and methods

Generally, cakes are meant to be edible. Most cakes are made with wheat flour and therefore gluten, which means special care needs to be taken to ensure cakes don't have a chewy texture. The cake ingredients are mixed as little as possible once the flour has been added. This differs markedly from sturdy food items made with flour such as bread, where the goal is to agitate the gluten as much as possible. Cakes often rely on beating eggs and addition of leavening agents, such as baking powder, to produce the air bubbles in the cake. This is what makes a traditional cake fluffy and spongy.

Typical ingredients are wheat flour, eggs, oil, water, baking powder, vanilla extract, and sugar. Soft flour/cake flour is often used, as it has less gluten than either hard flour/bread flour or regular flour. Cocoa powder or chocolate is added to make a chocolate cake. Butter or light-tasting oils such as canola oil are used. Strong-tasting oils such as olive oil are usually not used as they can overwhelm and contradicts the taste of other ingredients. There are several methods to combine cake ingredients:

Creaming method - butter and sugar are creamed together before the rest of the ingredients are gradually added.
Melt-and-mix - dry ingredients are mixed together and then melted butter and other liquids are added to complete the cake.
'All-in-together' - the dry ingredients and shortening are placed in the food processer and liquid is gradually added.
Sponge-making - eggs and sugar are whipped to a froth and flour is carefully mixed in. No raising agent or fat is used in this method and it takes great skill to make a light sponge

Sometimes flouring the baking pan is required to prevent the cake from sticking to the pan during baking. To flour a baking pan:

entirely wipe the inside of the baking pan with a very thin layer of fat (usually butter or margarine)
place some flour in the inside of the pan. Shake the flour around inside the pan until the inside is entirely coated with flour.
tap the pan and shake out the excess flour that is not sticking to the pan. Discard this flour. The pan is now ready to have batter poured into it.

Most cakes are baked in an oven at a low temperature. Other cakes require refrigeration to make them set and stay firm.

Cake mixes

Cake mixes are often used at home because they are convenient. Most cake mixes simply require adding the package contents to eggs and oil in a bowl and mixing for two to three minutes. The mixture is then ready to be poured into pans and baked. The powder mix requires the addition of ingredients before baking. Typically, a modern cake mix contains flour, sugar, shortening, leavening agents, and appropriate flavorings, and instructs the user to add egg, oil and/or some form of water to the mix before baking. Some mixes do not require eggs or oil.

Prepackaged cake mixes were first introduced to American grocery store shelves in the 1940s by companies including Betty Crocker and General Mills, who touted the use of their product as more convenient and resistant to human error than the process of baking a cake from_scratch.

The original Betty Crocker Cake Mix, requiring only water to be added, sold poorly. The company conducted a survey to find out why, and discovered that housewives felt guilty, believing that by making something so easy to bake, they were cheating their families. The company responded by changing the recipe to require an egg to be mixed in, and sales turned sharply upward.^*

Cake decorating methods

A finished cake is often enhanced by frosting (icing) and toppings such as sprinkles. Frosting is usually made from a fat of some sort, powdered (icing) sugar, sometimes milk or cream, and often flavourings such as vanilla extract or cocoa powder. Some decorators use a rolled fondant icing. Commercial bakeries tend to use lard for the fat, and often whip the lard to introduce air bubbles. This makes the icing light and spreadable. Home bakers either use lard, butter, margarine or some combination thereof. Sprinkles are small firm pieces of sugar and oils that are colored with food colouring. In the late 20th century, new cake decorating products became available to the public. These include several specialized sprinkles and even methods to print pictures and transfer the image onto a cake.

Cake decorating classes are popular, and one of the largest companies specializing in this industry is Wilton. Special tools are needed for more complex cake decorating, such as piping bags or syringes, and various piping tips. To use a piping bag or syringe, a piping tip is attached to the bag or syringe using a coupler. The bag or syringe is partially filled with icing which is sometimes colored. Using different piping tips and various techniques, a cake decorator can make many different designs. Basic decorating tips include open star, closed star, basketweave, round, drop flower, leaf, multi, petal, and speciality tips.

Popular icing types include buttercream icing, which is made from butter, or cream cheese icing, which is typically made by substituting half the butter of an icing recipe with regular cream cheese.

Layered cakes are cakes with more than one cake or ingredient stacked on top of one another. Layered cakes can consist of cake along with fruits and other fillings such as custard or icing, or several thin cakes with icing in between the layers. The latter type is produced by either baking several thin cakes, or baking a thick cake and carefully cutting the cake horizontally; The traditional Victoria Sandwich is the most common type of layer cake in the UK.

In the United Kingdom there is a long and diverse tradition of cake decoration. Those who do it seriously tend to bake their cakes without the use of cake mixes i.e. using traditional methods of baking. Royal Icing, Marzipan (or a less-sweet version, known as Almond paste), Fondant Icing (also known as Sugarpaste) and Buttercream are used as covering icings and to create decorations. Floral Sugarcraft or Wired Sugar Flowers are an important part of Cake Decoration. Special occasion cakes, such as wedding cakes, are tradionally rich fruit cakes, or occasionally Madeira cake (also known as whisked or fatless sponge), covered with marzipan and either Royal Iced or sugarpasted, finished with Royal Iced piped borders and adorned with a piped message, wired sugar flowers, hand-formed fondant flowers or marzipan fruit, piped flowers, or crystalised fruits or flowers such as grapes or violets. More recently it has become popular to have a mixture of both rich fruit cakes and sponge cakes in a single cake, either stacked or on stands for these occasions. These sponge cakes would be split and filled with preserve and/or buttercream and covered in sugarpaste. Similar traditions exist in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia and New Zealand.

Facts about Cake

The most expensive cake ever made was the Diamond Fruit Cake, a Christmas cake studded with 223 diamonds and put on sale for $1.7 million dollars in Tokyo in 2005.
The world's biggest cake was made in Alabama in 1989, and weighed 58 tons, including 7.35 tons of icing. The world's largest gingerbread man was a puny 168kg by comparison.
One of the best selling cake companies in the world was Betty Crocker

References

In the Sweet Kitchen: The Definitive Baker's Companion by Regan Daley ISBN 1579652085
Baking and Pastry: Mastering the Art and Craft by Culinary Institute of America, 2004