I’m writing this blog entry as a cautionary tale for anybody out there who, like me, is addicted to watching cooking shows on television.
Chapter 1 – Background
I’m a big fan of Christopher Kimball and the folks at America’s Test Kitchen – I highly recommend becoming a subscriber to their site at www.AmericasTestKitchen.com. I originally found out about the website by way of their two cooking shows: America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Country. As a subscriber to their site myself, I have access to all of their shows, recipes, equipment reviews, and product tests so I recently looked to them for guidance when I decided it was finally time I perfected a Yellow Layer Cake (the video and corresponding recipe came from their Season 1 episode entitled The Perfect All-Purpose Cake).
The ingredient list is appealing: flour/sugar/leavening/salt + butter + eggs/milk/vanilla. That’s the who’s who list of what you want to taste in a cake.
These are strategically combined using a stand mixer. The technique they recommend is a hybrid of the creaming technique typically used for pound cakes and the cutting-fat-into-flour technique of biscuit fame. It makes a gorgeous batter! After this, I thought everything would be smooth sailing: divide batter equally into two 9″ pans that have been greased and floured (parchment circles in the bottoms of each pan) then bake for about 20 minutes at 350 degrees. Standard stuff. Oh…and be sure to rotate the pans halfway through baking.
Chapter 2 – Problems at Home
OK, here’s the deal – I tend to be a little heavy-handed in everything I do – for what it’s worth, I’m a Taurus who was born under the Chinese sign of the Tiger. And I drink a LOT of coffee. As such, there are three things you probably don’t want to have me do: (1) perform surgery, (2) show up with the bomb squad, & (3) rotate your cake pans halfway through baking a two layer cake. After doing so much that was right for my cake, I was appalled by the finished product (the cakes are still very molten at the halfway juncture and the sloshing I induced during the rotation created two barely edible pieces of abstract art). No amount of frosting could hide my shame.
I tried again and failed again – the layers were tasty, but were neither fluffy nor attractive. My story ends happily, though – and my salvation was simple enough and ultimately led me to an epiphany that I wanted to share. I’ll cut to the chase first and disclose how I solved my problem – I just baked each layer separately – I removed my jittery shuffling act from the equation altogether. Third time was a charm: the results were fantastic and delicious – fluffy and attractive at long last.
Chapter 3 – Self Reflection
As happy as I was with my third cake, and after indulging in a little self-criticism over my frosting technique, I continued to be plagued by my failure as a cake shuffler. After a couple weeks of pouting, I discovered a substantial factor that separated me from my beloved tele-chefs – they use a larger oven! I never gave the dimensions of my home oven a single thought and I’m sure that consideration would never occur to most people. As it turns out, there are two standard sizes for home ovens: 24″ and 30″. These two measurements actually describe the outside width of the ovens (note: the 24″ oven is 23 3/4″ wide and the 30″ oven is 29 3/4″ wide – can’t manufacturers be honest about anything?). The smaller of these has an inside width and depth of about 18″ which means the usable baking area is about 2 1/4 square feet. The larger oven has an inside width and depth of about 24″ for about 4 square feet of baking area.
My own oven is, of course, a 24″ oven (as is the oven in every house kitchen I have ever been in):
With an inside width and depth of 18″, two 9″ round cake pans can barely fit in the oven at the same time on a diagonal. In order to rotate my pans halfway through the baking, I had no choice but to remove BOTH pans completely from the oven in order to reverse their position – a cumbersome maneuver in-and-of itself but aggravated further by my over-caffeinated and aggressive personality.
Chapter 4 – FYI
The ovens they use on America’s Test Kitchen are from DCS by Fisher & Paykel – and if you’re a rabid consumer of kitchen porn (like I am), please be sure to check them out at www.DCSAppliances.com. Fisher & Paykel only sells 30″ ovens. With a 24″ width and depth of the rack inside the oven, there’s plenty of room to gently slide two cake pans around (the outside diameter of the lip of my pans is just under 9 3/4″). Without the luxury of a wider oven, I don’t think there’s any sane way to rotate two cake pans – the logical choice is to just do one thing at a time. Realizing that my oven couldn’t compete with their oven was liberating: once I stopped trying to imitate something from an alternate universe, it gave me the freedom to do things right in my own universe.
The moral of this story is that my two initial cake failures were largely the result of a step in my process that was wholly inappropriate given the constraints of my home oven. I will continue to experience bouts of “oven envy” every time I watch tele-chefs cooking in their magically clean worlds but here in my real world I just need to pay more attention to my surroundings and be realistic.
I had a high end 24″ Miele oven, moved, and now have an inexpensive 30″ IKEA model. I was stunned and elated to discover that the cheaper oven does a much (as in MUCH) better job at baking everything. I don’t know, but assume that it has something to do with the larger volume of the 30″ unit.
p.s. I thoroughly enjoy your coffee-induced, excruciatingly detailed posts. The bread series was especially good. These are the sort of instruction I can understand. Need.
Thanks for the positive feedback. I am trying to fill-in some of the details that I find missing in other outlines I see in books and online. Trying to go for a “Cooking in Thought and Action” vibe.
I thought you were born under the sign Lance; The Street Mime.
I was acquitted for the murder of Lance the street mime: no body, no weapon, no witnesses, no conviction.