In the next two lessons we moved onto a new cake method, modified creaming method. Modified creaming method is similar to the traditional creaming, but rather than adding the eggs together, either after creaming the butter and sugar or with the wet ingredients, the eggs are actually separated. The yolks are added to the creamed butter and sugar and the whites are stiffened with the sugar and folded into the creamed mixture.

To illustrate the point of this method, we focused on international cakes, mainly from Hungary and Austria. We started with a Dobostorte. Now if you’re like most American’s you’ve never heard of this cake, but it is actually a very pretty little cake and is shown at the top of this post. It is essentially a crepe cake, chocolate buttercream and a caramelized top layer, cut into wedges and applied to the tops of the cake like the spokes of a windmill!

In lesson 58, we focused on foam cakes, angel food and chiffon.  A big difference between chiffon and angel food cakes are that angel food cakes have no egg yolks, which is also why they’re always considered a diet cake (although with the amount of sugar in one, I’m not sure I can agree).

When making an angel food cake, there are a couple things that are important to keep in mind:

1. Never grease the pan
2. Never to bang the pan after filling it – doing so will completely deflate your egg whites and your cake will not have the same light, airy rise to it.
3. Angel food cake is always cooked by time, there is no other way to tell if they’re done!
4. If you want to add flavor to an angel food cake, you can only add spices to the batter, you cannot add anything fat-based
5. Angel food cake must be cooled upside-down. That is why angel food cake pans always have little feet. If you cool it right-side up, the cake can collapse because it only has flour and a little egg protein keeping it up.

Both angel food and chiffon cakes are great keeper cakes that freeze well.

Unfortunately, while trying to cool my chiffon cake upside down on a bottle, it fell off and hit the floor :(…luckily I got to try some of this delicious cake from my other class mates.