A few weeks ago, I was looking through cooking classes at a college around here that has a well-known culinary degree program. They also offer classes as part of their continuing education program, so if you were like me that doesn't want to get a degree but take a course at night, they have a ton of those. The summer semester started already, so the only one I could have taken was Baking 101. I thought it would be fun - learn some tricks and make some yummy sweets. I debated it for a while because it's pricey and a big commitment - 12 weeks, 4 hours every Tuesday from 6-10pm. Plus I'd miss one class while we went away. Eventually, the class got full and only wait-list available. I guess that made the decision easier. Hehe. I also checked out some reviews online and read someone's blog about the class. Some recipes I realized I would never make on my own, so there'd be no value in learning it in class (though still fun), and they use not-great ingredients like shortening instead of butter and artificial vanilla (I guess to save money).
So instead... I'm starting my own baking class/project. I brought out my cookbooks and marked recipes I'd like to try or sound yummy. Each weekend, I'll try my hands at one of them. Not sure how many I marked, but here goes!
Today's recipe: Marble Cake. It's the first one I marked from this book I have, but I have also been wanting to try something with cocoa powder since I bought some a few weeks ago at the market. I didn't have a 12 x 4 1/4 inch loaf pan, and didn't want to use up all the butter I have, so I made only 1/4 of the recipe and was going to try it with my mini loaf pans. I think not doing the full recipe was my downfall. So, there's Lesson #1. The cake came out OK, kinda dense and not as fluffy as I thought it was going to be. You can see from the picture that I did not follow the recipe very well and did not marble the dough as much as I should have. The recipe also did not specify what type of butter and I only had unsalted butter. Lesson #2: Only use unsalted butter when the recipe specifies it.
2 comments:
Rules of thumb for baking following a recipe are to use:
1. Unsalted butter so you can control the amount of salt in the batter (as all salted butters don't have the same amount of salt).
2. Large eggs.
For the marble effect, layering the batters (vanilla, chocolate, vanilla) in the pan helps to get the marble effect throughout.
Good luck!
But if you use unsalted, how do you know how much salt to add on your own? Last time, I could taste the difference... the dessert tasted un-buttery.
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