Recipe Success–Two Tips
August 26th, 2008
I have to share a funny story. My daughter called the other morning saying she had gotten up early so she could make a cake for a friend who was coming in from London. It was a butter cake recipe and as she read the ingredients; after she had put the flour and liquid in the bowl she realized she didn’t have any eggs.
You know what she did, because we have all done it, trundled off to the store which took at least 25 minutes. She gets home and adds the eggs and then continues to read the recipe and realizes she doesn’t have the butter it calls for. (The title of the recipe is Butter Cake). By now she is thinking, “What was I thinking”. She doesn’t want to go back to the store so she makes the cake without the butter.
Later she called just laughing. The cake was one inch high. It didn’t call for leavening but the eggs were to be beaten well and she just stirred them in by hand. There are two things we can learn from this; one is time management and the other is how to organize when we are baking.
•Read through the recipe all the way before starting to make it.
•Make sure you actually follow the recipe for best results. This doesn’t mean never to deviate from the directions, but be aware the results may be different if you don’t follow them.
I’m not sure what she did with the cake but we had a good laugh and she learned a good lesson. Another day I’ll share my own cake story with you. What ‘surprises’ have you had by not following a recipe? Or for that matter for following one.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
I SO love this story. When I was getting my B.S. in Food Science we always had to read through the experiment from start to finish and collect all our chemicals and glassware before we started. The other thing we had to do was write down every little deviation from the given methodology as well as note any/all observations.
I still do this with all of my recipes. I’ve made some great creations and I can replicate them because I kept good notes.
I’ve also noted great disasters like never try to cook an angel food cake in an oven that varies in temperature by more than 50 degrees during an heat cycle. You get a flat, raw in the middle, burnt on the outside lump of gunk.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:08 am
I had no idea oven temps fluctuated that much. One year my daughter was being sweet and tried to make me an angel food cake for my birthday (that is the tradition) and she greased the pan–so you know the rest of the story. We have had several laughs about that through the years.