Cakes, bother them

[adaeze]

Oh wise and talented flist,

Why is it that *every single time* I attempt to bake a cake, by any variation of the "cream butter & sugar, then add eggs" method, the wretched mixture always always always curdles?  I did *everything* by the book this time, eggs out of the fridge last night to be sure they'd be room temperature, butter & sugar creamed till they were as light as a feather made from hydrogen, and as fluffy as Exceptionally Cute.  And yet still, at the first hint of egg, it curdled.

I know it's not the world's greatest disaster, and I know the Christmas cake will taste just the same.  But it's the principle of the thing - just once in my life, I want to make a non-curdled cake!

Comments

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Leave the butter to go soft for a few hours (or microwave it if you have less organisation - use short bursts and check it frequently, as if you zap it really hard you get really interesting melt patterns but it makes the later stages a bit more awkward).

Cream the butter and sugar together as hard as you can. The softer the butter the easier - although if you melt the butter it'll go sloppy which makes it hard to judge the consistency of the mixture later. Taste it (mmmm....). Have another bit so you can crunch the sugar.

Put a bit of the flour on top of the butter, probably a couple of ounces as that's an egg's worth, and break an egg over it. Mix that lot up thoroughly. Repeat until you've used all the flour and all the eggs. Taste it, remember all those raw egg salmonella scares, ignore them, and have another bit as it's so nice :-)

See how thick the mixture is, and probably add a bit of milk to loosen it up. Chuck in spices and fruit if it's that sort of cake (normally a microwave faux-spotted dick, for me). Check that the taste hasn't magically disappeared.

Realise that you've forgotten to do the cake tins - I use a butter paper to grease them, then sprinkle a little flour over the base and jiggle the tins while drumming my fingers on them to get an even spread. Discard the excess, and don't worry about the bare patch that you missed with the butter paper.

Dump mixture in and cook with the oven turned up to about *there*, until it's probably done (ie it's coming away from the sides), then leave a couple of minutes longer to be on the safe side. Lick out the bowl and start making the icing. Have a cup of coffee to wash away the taste of cake mixture.

Alternative cooking technique if it's destined for pudding rather than cake: put in a mcrowaveable dish and cook on high for about 5 minutes, or until there are no soggy bits left on the top.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much what I do, only I don't usually bother softening the butter, if it was in the fridge I just cut it up small and pound it with a fork.

Adding the flour and egg at the same time solves the curdling for me. Oh, and lots of milk, I reckon recipes almost always tell you to not use anything like enough liquid, if you follow their instructions the cake gets rather heavy.

If you have a big sharp knife, enjoy the wielding of same, and are ridiculously lazy, you can also mostly skip the greasing of the cake tins and basically carve the cake off the tin at the end.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... it's occurred to me that another thing I sometimes do is beat the egg up in the milk then add them together to a big pile of everything else. Though I can't say I do that consistently.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

knife trick only really works if you have those tins with removable bases. Which are very helpful :-)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

You can get away with it if you are using a bread tin too, as long as the cake is reasonably coherent and not too crumbly. But yes, definitely better with the removable bases!