Be wary of labels

Labels can be wrong, and looks can be deceiving. Well, that’s not earth-shattering news, is it? Have you ever tried to buy white paint to match the white paint you already had without having a swatch with you to compare? There’s white, and then there’s white. And don’t we feel dumb when we get the new paint home and see that the two whites aren’t even close. Similarly, if we need a half-cup measure, we grab a half cup measure, but we don’t grab two half cup measures in order to verify the truthfulness of the first. We don’t do that, and neither did I.

What I grabbed was a scoop to scoop my cake flour (you remember my cake flour, don’t you?) into the sifter (oops, didn’t need a sifter, did I?). Then when I needed to measure my cake flour – well, why dirty two utensils? The scoop is a half cup, so I used that.

Now looking at these two measuring utensils, one can see an obvious difference, just like the obvious difference between our hypothetical new white paint and old white paint. However, since I did not have the benefit of this side-by-side comparison while I was preparing my Tender White Cake, I had no clue that I was relying upon an unreliable label. Today the light dawned as I was doing the dishes. With DH as my witness I poured a pre-measured amount of water into the “half cup” scoop. Guess what. It required six ounces of water to fill it. That’s three-quarters of a cup, a fifty percent error.

So when preparing my Tender White Cake and measuring two and three-quarters cups of my cake flour, I actually got almost four and one-quarter cups of cake flour! I believe that was more than enough to sabotage the Tender White Cake, far more flour than the prescribed leavening and flavoring were capable of handling. That explains the thick, flour-paste consistency of my batter, the heavy density of the finished cake, the lack of taste, and probably the inability to achieve “paste”.

Plainly and simply, I was duped by a cheap dime-store scoop and the non-English speaking, foreign company that squirted it out of the extrusion machine that some American company sold for pennies on the dollar because it was obsolete technology. Politically speaking, we sold them the rope with which to hang our economy and my Tender White Cake.

The upside of this fraud is that I will confidently retry this Tender White Cake recipe, because apparently I am not the sorry cook I thought I was.

The Cake – first attempt

I should have mentioned in the first post on this subject that lately, that is, in recent years, the very thought of my making a scratch cake is laughable. My experience is rife with failure. Ever the optimist, however, and hungry for cake I proceeded today undeterred, feeling more energetic after a long holiday weekend and a short day at work. The taste of moist white cake was on my tongue, and I was as confident as any chef extraordinaire. So in keeping with the idea that blog-life is not real-life I became very organized.

I never lay out my ingredients, never use little bowls, and I’m never meticulous about any of it. I never read the recipe all the way through. I start at the ingredients and usually stop there. Normally – my normal, that is – I miss an ingredient or mis-measure an ingredient. I’ve gotten used to that aspect of my cooking. Nothing ever goes as planned. Maybe I became an improviser in self-defense. No, more likely that word is just a subconscious euphemism for bungler.  Besides, you can’t really improvise if you don’t know the right way a thing is to be done, can you? I’ve never felt quite adequate about the right way of doing things, but that photo of the ingredients is impressive, don’t you think? Things were going well at this point.

Anyway, back to the cake. Last week I acquired the ingredients, and how convenient that the flour box had a recipe on the back. Not just any recipe but a tender white cake recipe! However, I was pretty wacked out when I read the directions. I’d never seen a cake recipe that combined dry ingredients with the butter. Apparently, the “paste method” is lesser known than the “creaming method”. While waiting for the butter and eggs to come to room temperature, I went online to check for any helpful hints and pointers. There was one mention that this cake flour is pre-sifted - triple sifted, in fact, and that additional sifting could effect the structure of the cake. Did you notice the lovely peak in my flour - and the sifter in the photo? Grrrr. Moving on. I only made one ingredient substitution. The regular granulated, non-superfine sugar was not according to Hoyle and was apparently why I never achieved the paste. Which apparently sabotaged the cake’s structure. And probably led to the decidedly unlight and unfluffy batter. I smartly had doubts that things were still going well.

Online reviewers of this recipe (5 stars) reported the inability to pour the batter into the pans, needing instead to scoop its light fluffy-ness. My batter, however, poured easily … like a thick, flour paste. Ah, ha, I did achieve the paste stage! How wonderful for me. Having been as obedient as I’ve ever been with a recipe, I broke with the instructions and used a ten-inch silicone pan, figuring it would cook similarly to the 9x13 pan. Ha! Wrong! I set the timer for 28 minutes and then reset for ten minutes at least three times and then one minute at least ten times. This produced a cake with an undone center and the surface and sound of a hollow bamboo cane. The taste was bland. The texture was sort of moist and crumbly ... and sort of not. The weight was hefty. Who knew that baked flour paste bakes up like a brick? (I went into DH’s den to weigh it on the postal scale. Four pounds ten ounces including the platter. DH said, “You’re not going to mail that, are you?”, inferring we couldn’t afford it.

It came out of the pan very nicely probably due to its tonnage, but I did actually Pam and flour the pan. The crust was nice. I think it will be good toasted with butter. DH suggested jam. I think perhaps armadillo bait.

Dare I make a trip to the bank and try again? It might be cheaper to buy the $22 Betty Cake. That’s a single iced layer, mind you.