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Message: [QUOTE="Norcalbaker59, post: 38713, member: 2340"] No worries [USER=3306]@Lee_C[/USER], if there is one topic I love to discuss, it's baking. 1. why both baking powder and self rising flour? I'm pretty sure that is Mary Berry's recipe. Her recipe uses both baking powder and self-rising flour because her original mixing method is all in one. That means all the ingredients are placed in the bowl, mixed and baked. With all in one, there is no mechanical leavening, which will results in a low rise. To create more rise, she added baking powder to the the self-rising flour. So what is mechanical leavening? Creaming butter (or any solid fat) and sugar. Creaming butter and sugar is NOT about mixing your ingredients, it's about leavening. The sugar crystals cut through the fat. The longer you beat the butter and sugar, the more air pockets you create. Sugar is hygroscopic--meaning it attracts water from the environment. You see the affect of hygroscopic properties when you leave a piece of unwrapped hard candy on the counter. After some hours the unwrapped candy is sticky. That's the sugar pulling water from the air. Sugar does the same thing in your cake. So the butter has a bunch of air pockets. All that sugar is in there. You add you wet ingredients. The sugar starts to attract that water. The baking powder is activated the by moisture and acid and begins to make gas. Then you add heat from the oven. The water evaporates and creates steam. The steam and the gas from the baking powder create lift. So the baking powder and the mechanical leavening work together to create a nice rise. Because Mary Berry's original did not use mechanical leavening for that extra help with rise, she doubled up on the chemical leavening--the baking powder. 2. Adding cornflour to make cake flour: no, adding cornflour to plain or self-rising flour does not create cake flour. The practice of adding cornflour to cake recipes dates back to 1896 and possible earlier. Refined flour (bran and germ removed) did not exist until the late 19th century. Flour was stone milled. So it was coarse and more suited for bread. Cake as we know it today, was nothing like the cake our great-grandmothers baked. in 1896, Fannie Merritt Farmer published a cookbook titled, "The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book". In subsequent editions the title would become the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Fannie Farmer is the godmother of baking. The most significant contributions she made to baking (and cooking in general) was the use of standardized measuring cups and spoons. In addition, she used level measures, meaning the dry ingredients were leveled even with the top of the measuring cup and spoons. The other lesser known contribution she made was her approach to cake batter. She used a full 1/2 cup of cornflour mixed into 1 1/2 cups of that coarse stone milled flour to create a more softer crumb. This produced a cake markedly different from cake during that period. Fannie Farmer called this cake a Velvet Cake. But in this day and age, we have refined flour. We do not need to mix cornflour to create a soft crumb. And it is a very bad idea to do so since cornflour is highly hygroscopic. Cornflour will suck up the water in you batter and create a gooey, dense cake. The difference between cake flour and plain and self-rising flour is bleaching. When refined flour sits, over time it naturally bleaches. The bleaching weakens the protein structure. When used in cakes, muffins, and pastries, the weaker gluten structure makes for a softer and tender crumb. Flour mills cannot afford to wait for the flour to bleach naturally, they need to get their product to market as soon as possible. So they started bleaching flour by exposing it to chlorine gas or benzoyl peroxide. But bleaching has been banned in many countries. So bakers started mixing in cornflour with the flour, much like bakers did in Fannie Farmers day. But they do this without understanding why Farmer and her contemporaries used the mix of cornflour and flour. They don't understand that the addition of cornflour does not change the amount of gluten in flour, nor its structure. Plus, its hygroscopic properties introduces a whole set of problems. Cornflour certainly has a place in baking, but not in cake batters. 3. There is nothing wrong with the flours you use. Yes, there are a slew of flours, but few home bakers have access to the array of flours produced for the trade. What's important is using the right flour for the application. Sometimes that means mixing a plain flour with a bread flour. And as you are learning, understanding the science behind chemical reactions of ingredients and temperature, as well as the reasons behind the various mixing methods. The hallmark of a great baker isn't the use of most expensive and exclusive ingredients, but rather a baker who can create an extraordinary baked good from the constraints of local ingredients and their equipment and oven. We can get really caught up in the labels and brands, but even the best ingredients can be baked into a crappy dry cake when poor baking skills and knowledge is applied. Years ago I read an article by chef Joyce Goldstein, a two time James Beard Foundation Award winner. She talked about how she yearned for a large state of the art home kitchen. How as a young chef living in Italy, her apartment and kitchen was so small she barely had room to turn around. When she became successful and opened her award winning restaurant in San Francisco, with its huge spacious kitchen, she realized that only worked in one small space in the kitchen. She really didn't need all that kitchen real estate to create a spectacular meal. I've been fortunate enough to get hands on training with professional pastry chefs in commercial kitchens. Trust me when I say commercial kitchens are stocked with some pretty basic stables that are the same quality as the home cooks buy in local grocery stores. And those expensive all-clad cookware in the high end retail stores---well, you won't see that stuff in a commercial kitchen. Yes there are some awe-inspiring speciality tools and equipment, but the basic bakeware is as basic as it comes. [USER=3306]@Lee_C[/USER], you are doing things right---you're reading and following instructions; you're analyzing your results; you're asking questions as to why things turned out the way they did; you're asking how to get a different result. But most important of all, you are enjoying the baking. You are living life well--it doesn't get any better than that my friend:D [/QUOTE]

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