Alphacakes

[davidn]

I made something new last weekend!



Point out my suspect choice of recipe source all you like, but this one came from cookingfailures - a post about a failure to make ASDA children's Easter cakes (which sounded about my kind of level) that I was immediately inspired to try myself, mostly in fascination of the way that you cut the cake into squares before icing the pieces so that you had the opportunity to put more toothrot per square inch on to them. Here, as far as I could make out from squinting at it, is the recipe.

Alphabet Cube Cake Things

275g butter
150g golden syrup
150g clear honey
125g caster sugar
4 medium free-range eggs
350g self-raising flour
450g (yes) icing sugar
Yellow colouring
Writing icing

1. Preheat the oven to 160C (320F in the measurement system I had to use) and line a cake tin with wax paper or whatever it's called in Britain
2. Put the butter (cubed), golden syrup, honey and caster sugar into a pan and heat them gently until they've all melted together into a sort of sickly mass.
3. Pour this into a bowl and leave it to stand for 10 minutes.
4. Add the eggs and sift the flour into it, then whisk it until it's a smooth batter.
5. Pour this into the cake tin and bake it for about 45 minutes, then leave it to stand for another 15 minutes.
6. Cut the resulting plank into cubes (you can work out the logistics of this for yourself).
7. Make up the icing sugar quite thickly with the yellow colouring, then once that's set, apply random letters to the top (or other symbols as well if you get fed up, as demonstrated above).

I quickly found out that the cakes were deceptively difficult to ice, because you have to use a positively Wingeresque* explosion of it to cover the surface of them all and have it dripping the right way - the surface of the cakes will not be uniformly horizontal as the picture on the recipe would have you believe! All you can do is spoon it over them very quickly and hope that most of them settle right, without causing too much of a flood of spare icing around the entire kitchen.

It has to be said that they didn't turn out quite as well as I'd hoped, but they weren't completely terrible for a first attempt at them and some value is reclaimed by the way that you can play about with them - you feel a compulsion to keep rearranging the cakes to form sentences that make sense, though admittedly my batch currently spells E@T A HORSE. I had one when I was on Skype to my parents and my dad said "I can see why it says '?' - 'am I edible?'" and "I hope they're eaten by this evening, or they'll glow in the dark". (He's where I get it from.) They were nice enough when freshly made, but they quickly deteriorated.

I think that I overcooked the cake a little (the instructions say more time than I've reported here) and it came out too dry, but having used Splenda instead of sugar might also have had something to do with it - I thought that the batter was very substantial even before cooking it, so it's possible that more liquid would help. On the positive side, they're absolutely nowhere near as sickly as you would think they were from the initial sugar-honey-syrup-butter napalm that you're directed to concoct.

* Do not look up

Comments

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

It's a bit of an odd recipe, and it deviates from the standard cake formula of 4oz sugar + 4oz butter + 4oz flour + 2 eggs = yer basic all-purpose sponge cake. Baking is essentially a series of chemical reactions, and each of the ingredients does something to the mixture, so change the proportions and of course it comes out differently. Compared to the traditional recipe, this one uses a greater proportion of sugar and flour, which would make it heavier because it's the fat and the eggs which give cake a light texture (you've shifted a little bit towards the "bread" end of the baking spectrum). In the defence of whoever came up with the recipe, you probably couldn't put this much icing on a cube of cake made according to the 4/4/4/2 formula because it wouldn't get squashed or fall to bits, so you need something a bit more solid to make this concept work.

[davidn]

It definitely seemed... significantly more substantial than normal batter when it was mixed up, and I think you've got the right reason as to why it was made like that. I also had to convert things to measures in cups, furlongs and pounds per square mile, so rounding errors may have crept in and exaggerated the intended toughening of it.

I was expecting it to taste much sweeter than it did, as well, given everything that goes into it.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I have to ask how you settled on what characters to use.

And would wax paper really be called something different? I mean, that's about as straightforward as a name (and a product) can get... I'm thinking "paraffin parchment" now?

Anyway, semi-failure or not, it looks like it was fun. :)

[davidn]

Since you asked... the first two rows of a Linotype machine, some random extras and vowels, then forgetting the idea and going into the extended character set!

Racking my brains, I think that "greaseproof paper" might be the same thing. You would be surprised - and I continually am - by how little American has in common with the language that I grew up using.

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is indeed greaseproof paper.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Perhaps Parchment Paper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchment_paper_%28baking%29)? This is specially-treated paper to prevent it from sticking, and it doesn't melt easily.

I've never been a fan of using wax paper, since wax has been known to melt at high temperatures, resulting in ... cookies that taste like Crayola. With cakes, I'm not so sure about the resultant waxiness due to the lesser amount of tasty goodness touching the paper, but I would think parchment paper would be a reasonable substitute.

I may want to look at this recipe in further detail later on - grams are a wonderful way to get perfect measures of ingredients. I've been using ounces, myself, and sometimes a few tenths-of-an-ounce can really change things.

Also, Wingeresque. *laugh*

[davidn]

I have to hope that I didn't just inspire everyone to look that up anyway ;)

"Parchment paper" is a term that Whitney uses... I'm not sure if they're all exactly the same thing but they have much the same effect. The original recipe just called for a greased pan, but I've found that using butter to grease a pan usually makes very little difference in subsequently bashing a cake out of it.

I'm quite excited to see if you feel like it's worth trying to do these things justice :) And also glad you see the benefits of the metric system - this is something that I miss a lot here!

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I think your cakes came out looking rather good, if I do say so myself. It ake it you don't have to slather the entire thing with icing, just the tops?

I have the exact same problem with turning a cake out of the pan! I haven't gotten that part down yet, and I end up sometimes with cakes with curved edges from my digging-around-the-pan :P

I'd love for the American and Canadian systems to merge - I know it's not going to happen but having everything measured in hundreds is just so much easier :D All this "1 kilogram is 2.2 pounds" and all that is just making me use my brain - though that's not necessarily a bad thing :P

[davidn]

The amount of icing is optional, I think, but I was just fascinated by how... neat they looked in the original recipe (from the post linked to above: http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii56/alcatraxe/random/DSCF2739.jpg ). The idea is to have enough to cover the top and go slightly over the sides to give it a good coating, but in places outside magazine-land this is impossible in practice.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I want the kitchens that these magazines and TV shows work in. They're gorgeous and roomy and have tons of space to spread out, all the more to allow big, heavy TV cameras to roll around in them.

They do look rather nice. Yours look quite good in comparison, too - you got what needed to be covered :D

I see what you did therETAOIN SHRDLU

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_greaseproof_paper_and_non-stick_parchment_paper

Well I'll be damned. :X You win this round o_o

Also: I had not even heard of Linotype machines, nor of the deceptively silly origin of that word (I had heard of Linotype.com, which it seems actually descends from the original company? Damn...) I can safely say I had not imagined that someone would have to invent a method of justifying text using the laws of physics.. What made you learn about these things?

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Tell me I'm not the only one who saw

HAPPY
ATR
ESE

Re: I see what you did therETAOIN SHRDLU

[davidn]

It's strange to go back to the strangest origins of things in my memory, when someone asks :) There was a series of books of collected misprints from newspapers - the kind that give the sentences unintentional unfortunate new meanings - and I remember the author's name was Denys Parsons. He described in the introduction to one book that he'd seen the phrase "etaoin shrdlu" appearing a lot as... gibberish characters, and explained that this was the first two columns on typesetting machines were arranged like that. The strangely almost-pronounceable phrase stuck in my mind.

Re: I see what you did therETAOIN SHRDLU

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a fun book :) I miss reading those sorts of things...