Why Not a Cake?
As usual, thinking ahead to the day's menu, or in the case of Friday, considering the evening before what I might decide to bake for Friday night's dessert, I thought: why not a cake? Make that a chocolate cake. Haven't baked one for a little while, so might as well. Needn't bother to look up a recipe, as I find just thinking up the ingredients then and there always works better for me. Invariably, finding a recipe in the newspaper, for example, there seems always to be something unsatisfactory about those recipes. Like the one I saw in Wednesday's Food section of the paper for a "red" cake, some celebrity cook's recipe which, to attain the red colour, used a tablespoon of cocoa powder and two bloody ounces of red food dye. Anathema! Call that baking?So this morning after breakfast I poured a few teaspoons of white vinegar into a measuring cup and topped it up with three-quarters of a cup of 2% milk, then set it aside. To curdle. Not spoiled milk, but rather deliberately soured milk. The better to bake you with, dear chocolate cake. And then I cut out two disks of waxed paper to fit into the bottoms of two round layer cake pans, and set them aside too, on the counter.
Measured out a half-cup of the best margarine money can buy: Becel. Added three-quarters of a cup of white sugar, one-quarter of a cup of dark brown sugar, two teaspoons of vanilla. Mixed until smooth, then added two eggs, one at a time, beating well between additions. Then I hauled out my triple flour sifter, set it over a bowl, and measured out one cup of cake and pastry flour, and sprinkled two teaspoons of baking powder over it, a few dashes of salt also. Good thing I bought another bag of cake and pastry flour last week, I thought, emptying the last of the flour bag into the cup and noting that it came to only one-third of a cup.
Out I hauled the new, as-yet-unopened bag of flour and thought how peculiar the new flour looked as I topped the second cup of flour up to two-thirds-full. That's when I took a second look at the printing on the bag, realizing that the flour looked "different" because it was different. I thought I had bought cake and pastry flour but obviously had bought whole-wheat hard flour instead. Should I ditch the flour and start anew, I asked myself, then decided to continue on. This cake would be comprised of two-thirds soft pastry flour, and one-third hard whole wheat. More nutritious, if same could be said for a cake. Oops, chocolate cake, right? So out came the cocoa powder, and a third of a cup of cocoa powder went into the sieve, along with the flours.
The sieved flour/cocoa was beaten into the sugar/margarine/egg mixture alternately with the soured milk, and when all was smoothly beaten to a good-texture cake batter, it was divided into the two round cake pans, and placed in a pre-heated moderate oven for 28 minutes, a tad long, but what I wanted. Nicely risen, nice and brown, good and solid when they came out of the oven. I waited a scant ten minutes before turning them out of the pans, pulling off the wax paper and sandwiching them on a serving plate to cool.
Then I prepared a yeast-raised bread dough for tomorrow night's pizza. Put on a chicken thigh and leg to begin preparing chicken soup for the evening meal. Put together a grated ginger/soya sauce/tomato paste mixture to be poured over chopped red pepper, jalapeno pepper, green pepper, large tomato, handful of mushrooms, and four garlic cloves. This was set aside to mature and the flavours to meld, as a sauce for the baked chicken breasts we would have for the evening meal.
Then we went out for our ravine walk and revelled in the sight of more jack-in-the-pulpits, foamflower, bunchberry in bloom; dogwood also, congratulating ourselves yet again on our good fortune in having this personal Eden at our doorstep. Then out to do the food shopping. And after putting away all of the food we'd bought for the week ahead, time to ice the chocolate cake. Simple enough: Becel margarine, cocoa powder, vanilla, icing sugar, and a tiny bit of whipping cream. Spread the nice dark results in between the cake layers, over top of the cake and the sides.
And I wondered: what would it be like, with the whole-wheat flour? I resolved to say nothing to him until and unless the cake proved to be a success. And it was: flavourful, fluffy-light yet moist. And then out with the story of the housewife who couldn't even read the identifying label on a bag of flour.
So, who cares?!
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, May 27, 2006
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