Entered on 21 May 2003 at 8:36 a.m..
Cake Baking Adventure
This Saturday is my friend Angie's birthday. Angie is the sweetest, kindest, gentlest person you'd ever want to meet. Anything beyond her in kindness would involve avoiding stepping on small insects. So because neither she nor I have been invited to the other big shindig this weekend (one of the girls in the office is getting married) I've decided to organize a nice lunch out for Angie.
To make the lunch a bit more special than normal, I decided to bake a cake. But I didn't have any cake mix on hand, so I decided to try out a recipie that I got off one of my spanish friends last year. From now on I vow to make all recipies that I get from people at least onece before they move away. So you see I hadn't really looked at the recipie since I got it. So when I went back to it a few days ago I noticed some small discrepancies. Such things as calling for natural yogurt. OK natural yogure I can find, but how much? The recipie just calls for 1 natural yogurt. Right...
And all the other quantities are in "glasses". Now last night as I was baking I decided that this probably roughly equated to cups, and as long as I was using equivalent amounts probably wouldn't matter too much. As I was baking however I noticed another small discrepancy. I was asked to separate 4 eggs and beat the egg whites before "adding everything else back". So did this mean adding back the yolks? I hope not because I didn't. This was actually a call that I had my mother make. Thanks mom. So the final product is supposed to be baked at 200 Degrees Celcius (392 F) for 30-35 minutes. Well at the 55th minute last night with the crust a nice golden brown to black on some edges and the innards still gooey, I decided that I was going to have to continue the baking at a much reduced temperature if I didn't want a charcoal bricket cake. So I reduced the temperature down to about 125 C (250 F) and left it in the oven to continue baking. At the 75th minute it finally came out.
As of this morning it looked fine and tasted OK. It is still a little blacker than I'd wish in some areas, but definitely edible. I know this because inorder to get the cake to lay flat, I had to cut part of the top off which was sticking up. Which was good because I had been trying to figure out how to taste test the cake with out actually cutting a piece out of it ever since I started mixing things together.