Sweet Yet Sour

Laura, her sister Kelly and I all took a “High Altitude Baking Class” on Wednesday night at Cookstreet and had a great time.  I think we learned a lot as well; the chef gave us lots of good tips, and we got to play around with our recipes, adjusting to see what worked out best.

It was a “Cakes and Muffins” class that was designed to teach us how to fix and adjust recipes so that they work well at altitude.  The problem with baking here at altitude is the lack of air at this level and here in Colorado, it’s dry as well.  Cakes (and bread and cookies too) fall and become dense at this altitude if you don’t adjust them properly.

Years ago I had a lovely Southern friend in my bookclub who tried making Red Velvet cake for one of our meetings.  She really did not know about high altitude baking, and I’m sure she did not realize what she was getting into when she tried making her Southern recipe here. It was so sad. It was a little 1/2 inch lump of dense red cake with frosting.  Frankly, I can’t really say I like eating blood red cake anyway (let’s all flash back to the armadillo cake in “Steel Magnolias”), but I felt really badly that she had worked so hard to get something that was not as wide as the book we were reading that month.

Eggs, butter, sugar and flour are your four basic cake ingredients.  The chef told us that each of these either weaken or strengthen your cake.  So depending upon your cake problem at altitude, you can adjust accordingly. 

For example, if your cake sinks in the middle, it means that there is too much moisture (eggs or butter that have weakened your cake) and not enough flour in your cake. 

There were several simple things that I was really glad to learn in class:

1. Packing your flour down is not good when measuring it for cake.  You must “fluff” your flour and measure it, otherwise you might get too much flour. And she suggested that we use a scale every time to make sure that we get the right measurements.
2. 1/2 cup (or any measurement) in your liquid measuring cup is not the same as a dry 1/2 cup.  I sort of knew this, but every once in a while when I’ve used all of the dry cups and haven’t washed them, I use the liquid cup.  Never again!
3. When the recipe says “cream the butter and sugar together” they really mean cream, like the texture is not very gritty, everything is mixed in well and the mixture is pale and creamy looking.  We worked very hard (or rather our mixers did) getting the creaming right in our recipes last night.
4. Always beat your eggs before you put them into a cake batter.  I always just throw the eggs in and let the mixer do the work.  Our chef instructor, took all of the eggs in our Pound Cake recipe, beat them together in a bowl, added the milk, and then added it to the mixer in a slow stream. Her Pound Cake was good, so I’m not going to argue with her, and will do it that way from now on.

We were assigned to make a Pound Cake and a Devil’s Food Cake.  We made an “adjusted” Pound Cake recipe, but without the above instructions about creaming and eggs. Later the chef showed us the “better” way to make it, but all of our cakes turned out “perfect” (the chef said “perfect” about Laura’s twice) anyway.

And then we adjusted a Devil’s Food Cake on an experimental level to see which adjustments worked best. The making of the Devil’s food cake was the best part of the class.  I was watching the creaming of the sugar and butter in the mixer, while Laura was working on beating the eggs and the buttermilk.  At some point in the middle of Laura adding the egg and milk mixture, I actually started to pay attention to the recipe and realized we had beaten 4 eggs instead of two.  Oops! So Kelly votes that we start over again and Laura and I voted to keep on with the experiment (2 votes to 1, sorry Kelly!). 

So we stopped adding eggs, added a little more flour, and threw in a little more buttermilk for fun.  I laughed through the whole process, because seriously, what does it matter? If a cake I make in class totally sucks, who is hurt here?  Cooking is 80% experimentation anyway, so why not have fun in your kitchen lab?

We were labeling our cake pans before they went into the oven with our “team name” and so the Devil’s Food Cake was appropriately labeled “Freak”, because we were not sure what the heck we did to the batter.

After the cakes were baked the chef pulled them all out on the counter and discussed the various flaws of each one.  There were some that had some serious cave-ins, and those were the ones that had too much moisture, and then there were ones that were marbeled, where the ingredients had not been mixed in properly. 

When she gets to “Freak”, she asks “Okay, this one is labeled Freak.  Who made this?” I then got to try to explain what happened to our cake and try not to laugh at the same time.  I laughed anyway, it was hard not to do so.

But really, Freak looked like she (I’m going to go ahead and make our Freak cake a girl) had held up pretty well.  Freak had a small cave-in the middle, but not as much as the other cakes on the counter. Whatever we did do to Freak, the cake turned out really well.  A small cave-in, but when we cut the cake in half and looked inside, the chef said that the texture and density were what we were looking for in a good Devil’s Food cake.  Hilarious!

Next time I make a cake, I’m going to be less afraid to mess around with recipe.  What a great experience this class was, I got to make cake, eat it and play with the recipe without fear.