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BAKING A DELICIOUS CAKE

It doesn’t matter how grand a cake looks on the outside, it needs to taste good on the inside too. the following three recipes for Madeira sponge (similar to pound cake), chocolate, and a rich fruit cake all produce cakes that are strong enough to carve into shapes and support the sometimes quite weighty frosting; but they are moist and soft when eaten. it may be that you have your own family favorites that work for you. if so, feel free to substitute your own recipes and, if you think others might like them, feel free to send me the recipe!

Flour

Apart from the rich fruitcake, I always use self-rising flour in my cakes. This is flour that already contains a rising agent to help your cakes reach spectacular heights when baked. Flour does vary slightly from country to country and very similar products are called self-raising or cake flour.

If you wish, you can make your own self-rising flour using plain (all purpose) flour and baking powder.

Mix 1½ teaspoons of baking powder and 1 cup (150g) of plain (all purpose) flour together. Double or triple these amounts if you need more for your recipe.

A friend of mine who runs an American cake shop mentioned recently that she sometimes gets customers complaining that a recipe they have used for ages suddenly doesn’t work. The problem is usually the flour, which they have measured in cups. Flour contains oil and if it is old, the oil dries out and becomes lighter. This is where a set of scales will help (and they don’t have to be expensive ones). Try redoing the recipe this time weighing the flour. If the flour is old and lighter, you may find you actually need to use more to achieve the weight your recipe requires.

There is also a wealth of information on the Internet about flour, how it varies and what may work best for you in your part of the world.

Superfine (Caster) Sugar

For sponge cakes and chocolate cakes superfine (caster) sugar is best. Superfine sugar granules are finer than normal everyday granulated sugar and will produce a slightly lighter cake. However, it is perfectly fine to use granulated sugar if that’s all you have. It will still produce a cake that is tasty and delicious.

Brown Sugar

There are all sorts of brown sugars, but for the fruit cake I use dark brown soft sugar as it produces a darker colored cake. When fresh it should be slightly damp. You can use lighter colored sugar if you prefer although I would avoid turbinado (or demerara or “raw”) sugar as it has an odd and distinctive taste. Make sure you seal the packet well after using brown sugar or it will solidify into an unuseable solid sugar brick! You can make your own brown sugar by mixing white granulated sugar with molasses. Use one tablespoon of molasses to every cup of white sugar.

Butter and Margarine

There are many types of specialist baking fats and margarines available, but for baking I always use butter, so I’ve specified butter in all the baking recipes. You are perfectly free to substitute something else you prefer. However, read the packaging as some of the low fat spreads cannot be used for baking. The one area I would never use anything other than butter is buttercream and, actually, I personally prefer lightly salted to unsalted butter—but again it’s a question of personal taste. I would never use margarine to make buttercream. I don’t like the taste of it and also some of the very soft margarines are designed not to harden and therefore don’t hold their shapes particularly well.

White Fat

Now I know that cake decorators in countries such as the USA have been using white fat for years to produce white icing. We have white vegetable fats here in the UK but it’s something we don’t normally use in this way. However, when you need a bright white, soft frosting, normal buttercream just won’t do, it simply isn’t white enough. So I started to invesigate easy white icings (frostings). There are different methods and ways of making white frostings, but by far the easiest way was simply to substitute white fat for butter in the buttercream recipe. I found I could buy white vegetable fat that contained no hydrogenated vegetable oil, no "e" numbers and no colors or preservatives and that it produced a good white icing. So go on Britain—try it!

Scales and Mixers

If you are serious about baking, I would strongly recommend that you buy a set of scales—they don’t have to be expensive. They will allow you to use recipes (and not just baking ones) from all over the world easily and correctly without resorting to guesswork. And as I mentioned in the flour section above, weighing your flour, especially if it’s a bit old, could save you from a flat disaster!

It’s the same with mixers. If you make cakes and frosting regularly, I would really recommend buying one. I have owned a large free standing mixer (which I have polished up for its moment of fame here in this book) for many years now and it just makes life so much simpler. Tip the (weighed!) ingredients in, switch it on and off it goes. However, I do appreciate that big mixers like mine are expensive so if you’re just starting out, invest in a cheap hand held one—I did. You can use it for other things too—whipping cream or making pancake batter for example.