My Experiments with Baking – 1

Baking cakes and muffins has been on my bucket list for a while now. I had baked a few cakes earlier, but most  of them were made from ready-made cake mixes. And we all know that baking a ready cake mix is no baking at all. So, nearly three months ago, I had this urge to bake. I scanned the web and found a very simple and easy recipe for cupcakes, here. I gathered all the ingredients, followed the recipe and voila! my first cupcakes were out of the oven. And…. they turned out real good! Friends and family appreciated the taste and flavour, the texture, moistness and the softness of these lil cupcakes. I was ecstatic so much so that I admonished myself for having not tried my hands at baking much earlier!

Inspired by the initial success, next, I baked Red Velvet Cupcakes. They looked good from far and were dry and a bit hard! Also, they were far from velvety!2014-10-04 17.09.05

I was not at all deterred by this setback, and I thought of repeating my first success story. My father’s birthday was around the corner so I planned to bake cupcakes for the special day. Once again, I followed Annabel’s basic cupcake recipe. This time, the cupcakes did not rise (to the occasion) and turned out all flat and wrinkly as I looked at them with disbelief. The saving grace was that they tasted all right!

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Intrigued but not discouraged by these failures, I read up all the reasons for the fall of my cupcakes and even chatted on Whatsapp and Facebook with some baker bloggers.

Some said baking powder could be the culprit, so I tested the baking powder for its efficiency and despite the poor powder passing the test, I banished it from my kitchen and in fact changed my baking powder thrice in 2 months!

The experts say that exact measurements are crucial for baking a perfect cake. Though I have measuring cups and spoons, I bought a kitchen weighing scale to get the measurement EXACTLY right… to the last gram!

A friend believes that an electric hand whisk is an essential piece of kit when making cakes. I thought I was beating the living daylights out of the batter and overbeating is also one of the common reasons why cakes sink. So, I invested in a new electric hand whisk too and learnt the technique of folding the batter from YouTube videos.

Over the next few weeks, with new gadgets, new techniques, lots of reading up on the internet and watching innumerable YouTube videos, I tried some more cupcake recipes and baked ‘my first (and the last?!) successful attempt recipe’ a couple of times and the results were the same…  flat, deflated cupcakes!

Oven temperature could easily make for a falling cake, some websites said. I looked at my rarely-used-till-a-few-months-ago oven and it stared back at me accusingly and seemed to say, ‘Don’t accuse me if your cupcakes look like erupted volcanoes. It is truly a case of pot calling the kettle black!’

I believed what my lil oven said and immersed myself in self-depreciating thoughts!

Till…

…To be continued!

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