A girl can only take too much chocolate brownie, so instead of continuing the brownie experiments, I decided to try with orange cake. The ringbearer was not so pleased, he considers fruit based cakes to be 'girly and healthy'. How a cake consisting of almonds, sugar, eggs and oranges could be called 'healthy' is beyond me. One way almondy heart attack if you ask me. So everyone knows chocolate and oranges go, so I thought I'd add some minstrels (crispy shell possibly adding texture, or protection from chocolate oozing) and some gummy bears (because they're fruit flavoured too).
Stage 1. Orange and almond cake preparation. Having started on the task of grating 3 oranges, I was forced to put on a very feminine apron. This combined with my fashionable T-shirt/dress leggings combo, gave me the appearance of a medieval baker (or chorus member in the Pied Piper). Under such feudal conditions it seemed fruitless to comp
lain about how the oranges were turning my hands well...orange.Stage 2. Folding issues. My recipe required the eqq whites to be folded into the main mixture or almonds, eggs and sugar. How was I to add the minstrels? Would the weight of the minstrels somehow interfere with my gentle folding of the egg whites? Would all the air be
lost? Could minstrels act as nucleation sites for air loss? (unlikely, I know)Stage 3. I opted to gently insert the sweeties into the cake, with absolute minimum of stirring. Minstrels in one small sector. Gummi bears in another right next to the minstrels.
Stage 4. Baking and removal of the cake. Cake wa
s then pierced numerous times with a kebab stick and the orangey syrup poured over. The piercing was very soothing in a machine-gunning-a-cake fashion, I might recommend it as a stress handling technique.Stage 5. Serve
And so the mystery began. As you can see the minstrels were easy to find, although they added little to the cake eating experience, not being rich enough next to the oozy-almondy-cakieness. (Dark chocolate may be the answer). However, the gummi bears were never found. Never. They weren
't where they were placed - can gummi bears swim in cake mix?. We couldn't taste them or see them (and they were pretty obviously green and red). We searched every mouthful of the cake for a gummy bear and came up with nothing. What happened? Did the gummi bears evaporate? Did they get abducted by aliens? Were they rescued from the oven by Haribo the super-gummi? Did they become one with the cake? - so great was their love for all things orange? A complete mystery so suggestions on a postcard please.Next time, either minstrels brownies (Booooring) or mars bar strudel.
[Edited for my bad typing and grammar - pretty sure I didn't catch all of it either :( ]
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A theory – my guess would be that the glucose syrup melted and thus mixed into the cake mixture before the cake solidified enough to prevent the gummi from spreading. If the cake mixture is still in it’s liquid state and the glucose syrup melts first, combined with the presence of starch this might create a natural mixing event, thus all the gummi’ness would just be spread fairly evenly about the cake (and it’s basically just sugar and a little bit of flavouring so your unlikely therefore to be able to notice it).
ReplyDeleteAll of the above is of course based on my complete lack of knowledge on both baking and chemistry, so likely rubbish. However ideas for possible solutions:
1: Freeze the Gummies first – might delay the melting enough for the cake to start solidifying around it first.
2: Insert the gummies some time into the cooking process once the hardening process has already begun. – Don’t know how difficult that would be.
3: Develop more robust “super-gummies” possibly by feeding regular Gummi bears Gummiberry Juice thus increasing their melting point.
4: Try either cooking the cake slower or faster (lack of baking or chemistry knowledge perculdes me knowing which one more likely to work).
P.S. Fruit cakes are indeed “girly and healthy” – I support the ringbearer. Yey to chocolate brownies!
You see I considered the mixing angle. It's a pretty viscous batter, viscoelastic probably, which leads me to believe mixing within the cake would be minimal (also no baking powder acting so no air assisted mixing).
ReplyDelete1: Freeze the Gummies first
Interesting. I also thought larger gummi bears might help - less heat exposure
2: Insert the gummies some time into the cooking process once the hardening process has already begun.
I considered this but a crust forms...
3: Develop more robust “super-gummies”
Would that be like force feeding geese for foie gras? The gummi rites people might sue...
4: Try either cooking the cake slower or faster.
Bit of a risk of uncooked in the middle for faster and deflated for the latter I suspect
This cake is not healthy. No-siree. Replacing flour with almonds does not make something healthy...