I became an expert in cake baking 60 per day. There is everything here to know about cake

Despite being an obsessive baker since he was a small child, to 31 he had never baked a cake from scratch. Meaning: I had never made cake mass. And the cake dough scared me.

Cut butter into the flour? What meant that anyway? A bidding cortex (in opposition to the hard)? Are not “tender” and “hard” personality traits? And what happened to ice water? I wasn't sure to want to know.

At that time, I was writing mainly for women's magazines and taking strange jobs to reach the end of the month. My criteria for these works was that it was something that interested me and I would not interfere with my dream of being a writer. The fun, creative and without exit work were my timonera.

So, when my Seventen editor told me about a job opportunity as a summer cake baker in the most beautiful store I had seen, in a fishing village turned into a billionaire community in the Hamptons, I borrowed the Volvo Volv place east. “You look like a brilliant girl,” he said. “You will learn.”

If you do not have a German grandmother to teach you how to make cake dough, you should seriously consider one. At the end of my first week, I was practically a professional. And at the end of that summer, I knew all the tricks. I learned that when it comes to cake cortex, butter is not necessarily the king. That flour can give a cloud appearance. That a white and raw bottom cortex was 911 foot. And, as Anna says, the way a person criminalized the edges of his cake mass was like his signature; Not two are the same. I learned that a large amount of sugar on the top before baking the cake covered any imperfection in the bark and that perfection was not what we were looking for anyway. We were going home with, I hate cliché here, love. And that, even for the rookie Pie Baker, is an attainable objective.

The mother's name was Anna, pronounced “ahhh-na” no “anne-uh”. On my first day, Anna stood up with my elbow and taught me the ins and outs of the cake dough. The ingredient list is simple: flour for all use, some type of solid fat (butter, margarine, crisco, butter or combination), salt and ice water, which taught me was to keep the cold fat. By keeping the fat, let's say the butter, the cold, the butter melts in the oven during the baking process, creating small steam pockets, which resulted in the layers that make the cortex squamous.

The writer Carolynn Carreño with her crumble cake. Take into account the juices of the berry filling spilling from the cake dish (a sign of delight).

In terms of baking, Tough is the opposite of the tender. A hard crust, and you have had them, is hard, crunchy and dense. A tender cortex, on the contrary, is squamous and light. A tender cortex is the goal.

To achieve the tender holy grail of the scabs, the most important factor is not to expose the dough. You work exactly as much as necessary to transform it from a hairy disaster into a homogeneous mass. Working the dough develops gluten in flour, which makes a hard cake cortex. Rest the dough before extending it (also key) relaxes gluten.

'You have light hands'

I did 27 cakes on my first day, and I was not more proud of the stage as a graduate in UC Berkeley a decade earlier.

“Why only 27?” Anna asked.

She told me to advance, she should aim at 60 cakes a day. For the three or four day, I could do 60, and soon I was reaching that goal with spare hours, to bake what I wanted.

“You have light hands,” Anna said one day, looking over her shoulder. “You are a good baker.” About 30 years later, I still feel a big heart of blueberry color on my chest while I hear those words. (Anna died in 2015 at the age of 81, sadly beaten and killed by a car while crossing the street).

We made the dough in two -piece lots, which is essential for a tender cortex (because it is too easy to mix a larger mass batch). After making enough dough for 60 cakes, which are 120 rounds (above and lower), or 30 lots of mass, I put them on the walk (refrigerator) to cool and rest. Then I started the dough shells that had already been resting. I did those 10 at the same time. After having cake shells in the refrigerator, one of the preparation chefs would have a bowl as large as half of a beach ball full of the correct amount of fruit to fill up to 10 cakes.

The first thing you need when making fruit cake is a good cortex recipe. There is cold butter and a little cream in this for fat and extra flavor, and a lot of salt. Cool and rest your dough before extending it.

Sometimes the fruit was fresh, bought at Pike Farms, which has a position next to the store. But very often it was IQF Fruit, a term of the industry for “fast -quick frozen.” This rapid freezing process of the fruit retains the taste and prevents ice crystals and fruit from sticking. Many, but not all, frozen commercial fruit is IQF. Premium frozen fruit, collection and frozen to maturity peak, is often better than fresh fruit.

I brought that giant bowl to my station, I mixed it with granulated sugar, corn starch to swell (the flour can make the filling clouded), lemon juice to illuminate the flavor and a spice (cinnamon, nutmeg or nail, depending on the fruit), and proceeded to fill and cover my pieces with a second crispy or roar maintained in a vat in the air. I made six different types of fruit cakes per day, each identifiable by a different opening of cookie cutter in the center. We border on the cakes and take them out, brush the scabs (do not crumble) with cream, sprinkled sugar on the cream and bake them as necessary, so there was always a selection of freshly baked fruits cakes.

A cake is made in stages

That is a lot of information, I know, if you do not plan to open a bakery in the heart of a summer community where it is possible to need 20 to 40 fruits to sell in a single day. But I could have taught you some things in the narration:

• A cake is performed in stages, so that the process is more manageable.
• Okay, sometimes even better, use quality frozen fruit.
• Yes, you can freeze a prefabricated cake.
• And yes, you can bake a cake directly from the freezer. (It must bake it longer; trust the color and temperature of the fruit for donation).

The first thing you need when making fruit cake is a good recipe for the cortex. There are many. The formula we use in that store was 4 cups of flour to 3 sticks (1½ cups) of any fat that one would like to use.

This could have been at that time (maybe still!) The most expensive prepared food store on the planet. The cake was the secret “treatment”. It was half the price of a French cake. But the big difference between the two, soon, was that the French cake (which I also did, once I got well) was made with butter and the cake was made with, prepare for it, Margarina! “It's a further crust,” said Anna, said goodbye when I asked why and I walked away.

I have used that formula in different combinations until recently. Now use butter. According to the proportion of martha Stewart flour and butter, I add a little more and also the least amount of sugar. According to Nancy Silverton's cake mass, I add some cream, which makes to add fat, flavor and color to the dough, along with the ice water and duplicate the salt. It is a good squamous and easy to work dough.

Fruit cake filling can be any ripe fruit (or frozen!), Including strawberry ruibarb (yes, I know that riverbusa is a vegetable), blueberries, mixed berries, sour cherry, peach, nectarines and plums (Italian syneers are the best if you can find them), or a combination of any of the previous ones. Anna was not great in the fruits mixture, except when it came to berries, and I have followed her advantage for respect. But don't let that stop you.

The key to this fruit filling is to cook the blackberries, which are then added to fresh blueberries, raspberries and strawberries in equal quantities.

Square or round?

Here are two options for a mixed berries: a traditional round cake with a crunchy crispy crunchy and a slab cake, which is a relatively new invention, made in a pan. It is easy to carry, you have less stuffed because of the amount of bark, and you can eat it with your hands. Think about it as a giant pop-tart. And who does not want to think of a giant pop-tart.

For the filling, I cook the sugar first to make a candy, which adds a certain depth of flavor, and then add the blackberries; I discovered that even after more than an hour of baking, they did not break, and everyone who shared the cake with left entire blackberries on their plate. I also add the cornstarch here, as sure to make sure the fruit filling sets.

Make a rectangular double cortex tart in a baking tray, and eat it as a traditional cake covered with ice cream or whipped cream, or eat a square with your hands.

For both cakes, the baking in the lowest rack of the oven on a preheated baking tray to guarantee a gold and crispy background cortex.

Whatever the shape of your cake, anyone who uses and if your fruit gets perfectly, the cake is simply a good and healthy delight. Yes, making mass requires a little skill (everything you need to know is in these recipes), but the worst thing that can happen is really a messy cake that you end up eating from a bowl. And seriously, how bad that would be?

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