Intro to Baking Recap: Week 7

Intro to Baking Week 7 Recap!! ....But before that, some baking pics from few days prior...

I had some leftover egg whites on hand, so I decided to "practice" making egg-foam cake. Egg-foam cake, as the name implies, is a cake leavened with whipped egg whites. This category of cakes include the genoise, spongecake, angel food cake, and the chiffon cake. The key to success is in the proper whipping and the handling of the eggs. Simple enough, right?

...Not really. There are a lot of techniques involved in incorporating air into the eggs. Then, once whipped, the egg foam mixture must be gently folded in with the flour mixture. It's the air in the foam that acts as the leavening agent--destroying that by vigorously stirring results in a deflated cake. The only way to bake these very temperamental cakes perfectly is practice.

And so I did. I whipped the egg whites (or so I thought I did...) until stiff and glossy, veeerrrrry carefulllly folded them into the flour/egg yolk mixture, poured the batter into the tube pan, crossed my fingers, and waited....

Oooooooh la la!! The cake rose beautifully, with a lovely golden exterior!! Excited, I sliced a piece for a sampling.....

....then my heart sank.

...Deuce. Coarse, bread-like texture, and a HUGE tunnel reminiscent of the Cave of Caerbannog. Terrible. Well, at least it tasted good. I gave it away to a friend, whose entire family (including her two children) have a ravenous appetite for anything sweet.

So that was my battle with the egg-foam cake. I now have a new Archnemesis I must conquer.

Now, ten days before this, we received an Amish Friendship Bread Batter from a lady from our church. Yep, that pastry equivalent of a chain letter. We have received one in the past from our neighbor some 15 years ago when we first moved into our house. We did make the bread, just out of curiosity--can't remember what it tasted like, but it apparently wasn't tasty enough to be deemed worth remembering. So what to do? Upon online searching, I discovered that this batter is almost identical to a sourdough starter. Why not use it to make sourdough bread? That, and I wanted to try out the new baguette baking pan purchased for $2 at a thriftstore.

I used the San Francisco Sourdough Bread recipe in the school textbook.

The bread came out pretty (other than the little overhang on the side). Crispy, golden crust with a nice sheen. But let's see what the inside looks like...

Meh. Not quite baguette-like. I was hoping/expecting for a coarser texture with large air pockets characteristic of this type of bread. While it tasted excellent--the crispy crust was awesome--it was more like a regular loaf of bread than a baguette. This is worth experimenting...

Now, onto Intro to Baking class Week 7!!

Projects for the day: Poundcake, Cream Scones, Carrot Cookies, Morning Glory Muffins, and Lemon Bars.

We unintentionally change groups every week, which is fine--we get to work with different people. It's interesting/funny how the products turn out depending on the people in the group. I fortunately ended up with an awesome group.

Those are the Poundcakes in the back, and the Morning Glory Muffins in the front. The muffins have shredded carrots, apples, coconuts, and chopped nuts. Took me a while to shred two pounds of carrots and apples....

Our finished products. Clockwise from left: Lemon bar (baked in a tart pan), Carrot Cookies/Whoopie pie (with cream cheese frosting sandwiched in between), the muffin, and the Cream Scone. Everything went very well today. One group made a chocolate variation of the Poundcake. It would've been great except they kinda forgot about it and ended up burning it pretty badly. Another group put rum in the Lemon Bar/Tart, which explained why one of them was acting a little tipsy.

So that was class. Back at home, I baked the Green Tea & White Chocolate marble cheesecake that a local Japanese restaurant wanted to implement in their dessert menu. My family sampled it...Mmmm. Pretty good...the green tea flavor was subtle, and the white chocolate ganache definitely added some oomph to the sweet-factor. I took the cake to the restaurant that night. Upon tasting it, the owner said that it was delicious! She claimed that she would pay for this...and immediately served it to some Japanese customers who happened to be there. I was both delighted and bewildered at the same time... I mean, maybe she should have the workers sample it first before serving it to the actual customers?

She said she'll email me and leave a feedback...and it has been a while. Eh. She probably wasn't as serious about the menu as she said she is. But hey, I had fun making this and my family had a great dessert.