Thursday 13 August 2015

another cake failure

Sometimes I think I'm quite a decent cook.  The flan we had earlier in the week left me preening myself on my shortcrust pastry.  At any rate I am a tenacious one, and after the abject failure of the honey sponge cake (Julie Duff, Cakes Regional and Traditional) Mark I, I bought a seven inch ring mould specially for the purpose from an Amazon vendor.

It is a natty little anodised aluminium one, and I buttered the inside thoroughly and dusted it  with flour.  Grease and lightly flour a 18 cm/7 inch ring tin, that was what the book said.  As I added the flour and eggs to the creamed butter and sugar mixture, I began to think that it looked like a lot of mixture for the size of tin.  I am not practised at judging the volume of a sawn in half ring doughnut shaped receptacle by eye, but I couldn't believe the contents of the mixing bowl were going to fit comfortably into the tin with room for expansion, and they didn't.  Instead, the raw cake fitted neatly and exactly, which would have been fine if I hadn't been expecting it to rise at all.  Things were not looking good, and I stood the cake tin on a tray so that any drips wouldn't burn on to the bottom of the oven.

It overflowed.  I kind of knew it was going to do that, but hadn't fancied scraping out a proportion of the mixture and trying to cook it separately.  Or throwing it away.  Instead I ate the pieces off the tray, which had assumed a pleasant, aerated biscuit quality.  Then I heated up some honey, pricked the top of the cake and poured the hot honey over, skipping over the instruction to pour only half the honey then decant the cake, invert it and pour the other half over the bottom, having a premonition that wasn't going to work.  Instead I left the cake to cool in the tin, and then started trimming its muffin top where it had oozed over the edges, until I could run a knife round the edges of the inside of the tin to loosen the cake.  When I tipped it on to a plate a horseshoe shaped cake emerged, leaving one section still stuck to the tin.  Then I discovered I couldn't pick up the horseshoe to put it in a tupperware box without it disintegrating further.

I slotted the missing section back into the rest of the cake and inverted the box over it to keep the flies off until teatime.  At that point we ate the broken bit, and I put the rest of the cake away in the box and it broke in a second place, just as I thought it would.  The honey drench makes it so sticky, I don't think it has the structural strength to be picked up.  I dare say the ring mould will come in useful for something, indeed when it arrived the Systems Administrator began to make hopeful noises about circles of sponge surrounding islands of fruit, but I really think the honey sponge would be much easier done in a loaf tin with a paper liner.

The failure of the Mark II honey sponge rather dampened my enthusiasm for fancy cake tins.  After ordering the ring mould I went on surfing Amazon, to see if I could buy an Austrian style Guglfupf tin, as featured in Gretel Beer's book.  "...a Guglhupf really does taste better when baked in its proper 'setting'.  This is not an optical illusion but a matter of simple arithmetic: fluting means an increased surface over which to sprinkle the blanched almonds...".  Allowing for the passage of sixty years and the difference between Austrian and German spelling, you can indeed buy Guglhupf tins on Amazon, and their American cousin the Bundt tin.  By then I was so excited that I went on to see if it was possible to obtain a Rehruecken tin, a long fluted tin with a dent running down the centre, used for baking a particular kind of chocolate cake shaped like a haunch of venison, and was pleased to see that you could get hold of those too.  Though even Gretel Beer admits that if you don't happen to have a Rehruecken tin you can cook the cake in an ordinary one.

Since making my investigations into Continental European heritage cake tins I keep seeing advertisements for them embedded in every other website that I visit.  I don't know how long it will take the internet to work out that I'm not going to make a chocolate cake shaped like a haunch of venison any time soon.

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