be beaten to a thick cream and the whites until they are a solid
froth. Sugar tends to improve the texture of cakes, and when cheap
cakes are made, plenty should be used, provided that the cake is not
made too sweet. It should be dissolved before being added to the fat
and the flour.
For best cakes, and all that are required of a light color,
fine-grained sugar should be used. With coarse-grained sugar there
is danger of producing specks which show on the cakes after baking,
unless they have been made by the method of beating up the eggs and
sugar together with a beater over hot water. This method will dissolve
the grains of sugar.
Always buy the best fruits for cake making, as they are sweetest and
cleanest. Currants and sultana raisins for cakes should not be too
large, but of medium size, sweet and fleshy. Cheap dry sultanas should
not be used. Though there is no need to wash sultanas, yet if the
fruit is inclined to be very dry, it will be better to do so than
to put them in to spoil the appearance and the flavor of the cake.
Currants always should be washed, cleaned, and dried before using.
Orange, lemon, and citron peel should be of good color and flavor.
They should not be added to cake mixture in chunks, as often is
done, but should be in long shredded pieces. Large pieces of peel are
sometimes the cause of a cake cutting badly. In making fruit cakes
add the fruit before the flour, as this will prevent it falling to the
bottom.
If a cake cracks open while baking, the recipe contains too much
flour. There are two kinds of thick crusts which some cakes have. The
first of these is caused by the cake being overbaked in a very hot
oven. Where this is so, the cake, if a very rich one, has a huge crack
in the top caused by the heat of the oven forming a crust before the
inside has finished aerating; then as the interior air or gas expands,
it cracks the crust to escape. This crack spoils the appearance of the
cake, and when cut it generally will be found to be close and heavy
in texture. To guard against this it is necessary to bake them at a
suitable temperature, noting that the richer the cake the longer the
fruit takes to bake.
The second kind of thick crust referred to may only be on top of the
cake, and in this case may be caused by an excess of fat and sugar
being mixed together, or otherwise insufficient flour. In this case
the mixture will not bake, but only forms a kind of syrup in the oven,
and the
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