Yorkshire Pudding Cake
30 March 2022 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI tried making the one-egg sponge cake recipe as a single deep cake in a 6-inch cake tin instead of as a pair of shallow cakes, as specified. I added an extra 20 minutes to the baking time and adjusted the temperature downwards, as suggested by Marguerite Patten in her post-war general cookery compendium, theEvery Day Cookbook. I don't know whether it would have worked, given the extreme vagueness of my oven controls -- unfortunately I picked up the wrong measuring spoon and accidentally put twice the quantity of raising agent in!
The cake rose to the top of the tin, sat there with a pleasingly flat top (I had scooped a big hole out of the centre beforehand), and then suddenly sank before my eyes as if I'd opened the oven door -- which I hadn't! Apparently this is a common result of using too much raising agent; too much gas is produced, and then it all builds up into escape pressure and the mixture deflates abruptly.
At the end of the baking time, the cake came out of the oven Yorkshire-pudding-shaped, with a crisp ring round the outside and the middle almost flat. I can't even really cut out the centre (as suggested in Patten's invaluable list of When Things Go Wrong) and pretend it was a ring mould. I might pretend that it is a flan case, and fill the middle with tinned fruit and cold custard :-D
It was meant to be a coffee cake; I threw away one jar of instant coffee and was trying to use up the bottom of another. I don't drink coffee myself and haven't had any guests for years, and the granules in the expensive jar of Real! Not Decaffeinated! coffee had not only stuck together but had gone a nasty whitish colour, which I assumed was mould of some sort. At any rate it didn't look very appetising to offer to guests, and probably didn't taste of much...
The cake rose to the top of the tin, sat there with a pleasingly flat top (I had scooped a big hole out of the centre beforehand), and then suddenly sank before my eyes as if I'd opened the oven door -- which I hadn't! Apparently this is a common result of using too much raising agent; too much gas is produced, and then it all builds up into escape pressure and the mixture deflates abruptly.
At the end of the baking time, the cake came out of the oven Yorkshire-pudding-shaped, with a crisp ring round the outside and the middle almost flat. I can't even really cut out the centre (as suggested in Patten's invaluable list of When Things Go Wrong) and pretend it was a ring mould. I might pretend that it is a flan case, and fill the middle with tinned fruit and cold custard :-D
It was meant to be a coffee cake; I threw away one jar of instant coffee and was trying to use up the bottom of another. I don't drink coffee myself and haven't had any guests for years, and the granules in the expensive jar of Real! Not Decaffeinated! coffee had not only stuck together but had gone a nasty whitish colour, which I assumed was mould of some sort. At any rate it didn't look very appetising to offer to guests, and probably didn't taste of much...