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Cakes are the sweetest quick breads of all. About the only thing common
to all cakes is the fact that they are called cakes. Although most of us
might agree on what should go in a "cake," cakes can, literally, contain
anything from soup to nuts. Conversely, every ingredient you might assume
ought to be in a cake will be absent in some variation. The only two
ingredients that you'll find in all of them are some kind of sweetener and
a little salt to intensify flavor. (Some cakes don't even contain
flour.)
Cakes can be made with butter, margarine, lard, vegetable oil, or not
fat at all. They can be made with one egg or a dozen, with just the whites
or yolks, or with no eggs at all. They can be flavored simply with
vanilla, or with other extracts, liqueurs, spices, fruits, vegetables or
nuts. They can be enjoyed straightforward, light and simple; they can be a
vehicle for elegant toppings or icings; they can be the binding for a
profusion of fruits and nuts. All these and more can be called cakes. So
with this rather broad spectrum, we'll try to find a way to organize
them.
Cake Considerations
A "traditional" cake contains flour and an equal amount or more, by
weight, not volume, of sugar with a little salt to intensify flavor. From
there, the variation in ingredients is infinite.
King Arthur "Cake" Flour
According to some, the best flour for cakes is heavily bleached with
chlorine which, among other things, toughens the protein so that it can
hold more of those ingredients (sugar and fat) which put stress on a
cake's structure. King Arthur Flour does not pretend to be a "cake flour."
Not only are we opposed to adding chemical bleaches to our flour, but
because King Arthur is milled from hard wheats, it contains more protein
than cake flour. It will, however, produce cakes that have excellent
flavor and texture. But they are characteristically "King Arthur Cakes"
with a fuller body and greater "substance." Here are a couple of ways to
make King Arthur Cakes as light as possible.
Aerating the Flour: The first is to incorporate as much air into
the flour as possible at the outset. All flour is pre-sifted through many
layers of silk screening before it is bagged and shipped from the mill.
During shipment, all flour settles and compacts. Our mothers and
grandmothers used a sifter to restore flour to its original sifted state.
Today it is still desirable to accomplish this even when flour is labeled
"pre-sifted," but here's a simpler way to do it.
Before you measure, fluff up the flour in the bag with a spoon. Then
sprinkle it into a "dry" cup measure, and scrape off the excess with the
back of a knife. Flour measured this way weights 4 ounces per cup. Flour
scooped from a bag will weigh as much as 5 ounces per cup. Our recipes,
unless otherwise specified, are written for 4 ounce cups of flour. If you
used the scoop and sweep method in one of our recipes, your cake might
better be used as a door stop! Four-ounce cups of flour also contain
significantly more air which is the first leavening agent in a cake and
where a "light" cake begins.
Adding Cornstarch: A second way to lighten a cake made with King
Arthur Flour is to approximate the characteristics of "cake flour" more
closely. To do this, spoon 2 to 4 tablespoons of cornstarch into a one cup
"dry" measure. Sprinkle in your King Arthur Flour until it is full and
scrape off the excess with the back side of a knife. Blend this thoroughly
and you'll have pure, golden, never bleached, never bromated King Arthur
"Cake" Flour. While this technique will produce lighter cakes, many King
Arthur fans use our flour straight because they prefer "King Arthur
Cakes." And many of us who prefer robust cakes use some whole wheat flour
in place of unbleached all-purpose.
Cake Leavens
Baking Powder: Cakes used to be leavened by yeast or by the air
that was beaten into the eggs and/or butter in them. (The electric mixer
has taken most of the drudgery out of this part of cake making.) Although
getting air into cakes manually is still important, most cakes today
depend on the leavening power of baking powder which is a combination of
baking soda (alkaline or "sweet") and an acid ("sour") in powder form.
When this magic powder is mixed with a liquid and exposed to heat, it
begins to bubble and foam. It's producing carbon dioxide, just as we do
when we exhale and just as yeast does when it's making bread rise. Cakes
that contain an acid in another form, such as sour milk, buttermilk, or
fruit juice, need only the "sweet" half of baking powder, the baking
soda.
Yeast: "Chemical" leavening has been used for over a century now
in most cake baking, replacing yeast. WE have included a couple of recipes
for old yeast leavened cakes in the section. They take longer to make but
are unique in texture and flavor. In the same mode, you will find recipes
in the Sourdough Chapter for an incredibly dark, moist chocolate cake as
well as a "Friendship Cake" leavened with its own special sourdough
starter.
Cake Types
There are several classic cakes which we have organized according to
their density, the lightest to the most compact. A cake's density is
determined by several factors: the way it's leavened, the absence or
presence of a fat and its type, and those ingredients which contribute to
its structure as opposed to those which are held in the structure. The two
basic ingredients that create a cake's structure, or skeleton, are the
flour and the eggs. Everything else determines its "body type" and
"personality."
Although there are other ways of differentiating between cake types,
density is a readily observable one. There are many, many more cakes in
the world and many that won't fit into any of the cake categories. But if
you keep this "density scale" in mind, it will give you a starting place
and some perspective with which to understand these and other cakes in
your life.
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