The Systems Administrator, who was a fan of The Great British Bake Off in a gentle sort of way, is not convinced by the show's escalation in drama, with contestants throwing unsuccessful puddings into bins and storming out of the contest in a huff. It seems to be the inevitable fate of all soaps, but where will it end? With Paul Hollywood being thrown off a roof before an aeroplane crashes into the marquee and finishes off the lot of them? The SA would rather the GBBO stuck to being kindly, reassuring and not too eventful, with just a few severe remarks about soggy bottoms.
I have managed to produce my own baking failure, without recourse to popular TV, in the shape of a lemon drizzle cake which ended up as more of a lemon drizzle biscuit. It was the first time I tried the recipe, out of Julie Duff's normally excellent book Cakes: regional and traditional. I am pretty sure that the fault is not Julie Duff's, but all mine, and that the root of the problem lies in my effort to translate her opening instruction to preheat the oven to 180 degrees C into an Aga oven location for the cake. That and the fact that there is no standard depth for a seven inch cake tin.
The recipe was essentially for a lemon flavoured sponge, a creamed cake with equal weights of butter, sugar and flour, and one egg for the total twelve ounces of dry ingredients, with no added milk to mix it to a dropping consistency. The resulting mixture seemed pretty dry, but my rule is always to follow the book to the letter the first time, and only make adjustments if they seem warranted based on the results of the first attempt. Otherwise it can be practically impossible to learn new recipes, as you end up adapting each of them back to the nearest equivalent that you already know. So the oddly dry looking cake mixture, flavoured with lemon zest, went into one of my new seven inch shallow sandwich tins as instructed. That turns out to have been mistake number one.
Deciding how to arrange the cake in the Aga to give it the equivalent of Julie Duff's 180 C was a nice question. If I put the wire shelf on the floor of the lower hot oven that ought to be about right. Remembering how the tops of various other cakes and tarts have caught I put a solid metal tray in the middle of the oven so that the cake would sit below it, to shield the top. Which was probably mistake number two, though that's still a working hypothesis at this stage.
The book said the cake should be done in about twenty-five minutes, so I had a quick peek after twenty. It was clearly not done, because it wobbled when I opened the door, and the shallow sandwich tin was obviously too shallow, because cake mixture had oozed out over the sides of the tin. Lumps were lying on the oven floor, and the cake had a muffin top frill of escaping goo all the way round. I shut the door gently but rapidly, and gave the cake more time.
It was not done after twenty-five minutes, or half an hour, or thirty five minutes, and after that I lost count. Eventually it became more or less 'golden brown', though slightly darker than that at the back, but was certainly not 'well risen'. Depressed, that's how it looked. I took it out of the oven and trimmed off the singed edges, and the rest of the muffin top for good measure. When I experimentally ate some it tasted perfectly nice, in a biscuity sort of way. Unfortunately the uneven top, and splayed edges when I tipped the cake out of the tin, rather gave the game away that this was not some sort of deliberate shallow flan. This was a cake that had sunk. A failed cake.
I'd already got the juice of a lemon, since I had the lemon I'd grated all the zest off, so I mixed it with icing sugar as instructed, tipped it over the cake, and we ate it with cream, as pudding. It tasted of fresh lemon, in a slightly overpoweringly sweet sort of way. Certainly I've tasted worse lemon tarts in restaurants that were charging £4.50 a slice for the privilege, though never been served with one that looked quite so catastrophically and definitively awful. I am glad I did not have to subject my efforts to Mary Berry's scrutiny, though since she is a doyenne of Aga cookery I suppose at least she could have explained to me what I did wrong. I think the metal sheet must have been overkill, and the cake needed to be slightly hotter. In the meantime I have managed to buy a pair of deeper (and reassuring solid) pair of seven inch sandwich tins in The Range. I suppose the Lakeland ones will do for shortbread.
No comments:
Post a Comment