Cake Questions Three

May 17, 2008 | From the kitchen of Rose in General

It has happened again! Cake Questions Too has become so long a thread it takes forever to load so i have closed the postings options for this Thread and Reopened it as Cake Questions Three.

Please also use one of the 4 categories under Cake Questions:
Equipment
General
Ingredients
Wedding

Crossing the Atlantic by Cookbook

Jul 07, 2006 | From the kitchen of Rose in Ingredients

Cookbooks, particularly baking books, that cross the Atlantic have the well-earned reputation of being troublemakers. Differences in flour have long been suspected of being the culprit. When MacMillan of London bought the rights to publish my book The Cake Bible in the U.K., I was determined to get to the bottom of this culinary Tower of Babel. A British friend began sending me kilograms of the two basic flours available to British consumers: self-raising and plain, and I started baking. Much to my alarm, the cakes produced with the British flour were unrecognizable from their original models. It was hard to believe that innocent seeming flour could be responsible for such a dramatic difference. The logical way to conquer the problem seemed clear: to retest and redevelop the recipes to work as well as the originals, but with British ingredients. The only place to do this was in the UK with native equipment and native ingredients.

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Substituting Mascarpone for Sour Cream

Jan 06, 2006 | From the kitchen of Rose in Ingredients

ADAM QUESTION

In your Cordon Rose Cheesecake, can I substitute some -- about 6 oz -- of
mascarpone for an equal amount of the sour crream?

ROSE REPLY

sour cream has 18 to 20% fat. mascarpone a has about 55% fat so it will be richer and also not quite as light, but it should make a very nice variation.

Why "Real" Baking

Dec 16, 2005 | From the kitchen of Rose in Ingredients

why i believe in real baking, i.e. baking from scratch as opposed to a mix

i suspect that the two main reasons people bake from a mix is 1) that they think it’s faster and easier and 2) it’s practically foolproof. there may even be some who grew up with the flavor of a mix and actually prefer it.

i grew up without a cake baking tradition, in fact, my grandmother used the oven only to store pots and pans. there was NEVER anything baked in that oven until I went to the university of vermont, took a course in basic food, and came home thanksgiving vacation with the intention of making my father’s favorite—a cherry pie. it was a disaster of melting bubbling soap that I hadn’t realized was stored in the broiler beneath. in short, i learned scratch cake baking on my own—from scratch.

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