免烤奥利奥芝士蛋糕 [中文版]

吉利丁是什么？吉利丁＝gelatine＝明膠＝鱼膠。

Bloom number 是什么？
吉利丁片、粉都有一个Bloom number。号码越低，吉利丁的凝固力越弱，味道越腥，透明度越低。

可以用吉利丁粉代替吉利丁片吗？

No-Bake Oreo Cheesecake

There're four ingredients in my no-bake cheesecake filling: yogurt, cream cheese, icing sugar, and gelatine.

There's no cream in the recipe.

Why not?

Mango Mille Crepe Cake (芒果千层可丽饼蛋糕)

Crepes may be tough and rubbery. Or they may be soft and delicate, that they fall apart in the pan when you flip them.

What makes good crepes good, and bad crepes bad?

Gluten.

Matcha Swiss Roll

Knock, knock!

Who's there?

Matcha!

Matcha who?

Much ado about Swiss rolls.

This is another Swiss roll post, the third on this blog. 

Marble Butter Sponge Cake (Tang Mian Method)

Tàng, 烫: scald.

Miàn, 面: flour.

Tang mian is roux, made by cooking flour in bubbling hot butter.

Tang mian cake has the fluffiness of chiffon cake and the butteriness of butter cake. It has the best of two cake worlds but that's not all. It is smooth, smoother than chiffon or butter cake could ever be.

Some people call tang mian "cooked dough" instead of "roux". And the cake is sometimes called "黄金蛋糕" or "golden sponge cake". Hey, a rose by any other name . . . .

Chocolate Swiss Roll (巧克力瑞士蛋糕卷)

If you've never made Swiss roll before, or never made one successfully, please don't try my chocolate Swiss roll recipe.

Making chocolate Swiss roll is a bit tricky. Why? Because cocoa powder complicates things. If you want a straightforward recipe, go for vanilla roll. That's almost idiot-proof (not that idiots are the lowest common denominator).

Cocoa powder makes the cake less stretchable, so you have to be careful not to overbake the cake. Even slight overbaking makes the cake crack when you roll it.

Vanilla Swiss Roll (香草瑞士蛋糕卷)

There're a few common problems with making Swiss rolls: (1) The cake is hard and dry. (2) The crust sticks to the paper the cake is wrapped in. (3) The crust cracks when you roll the cake.

Good Swiss roll starts with, of course, a sheet cake that's fluffy. You know what's wrong with a lot of Swiss roll recipes? They have way too much flour.

A cake that's 1-2 cm tall should have very little flour because it doesn't need much structural support. If it has as much flour as a cake that's 5-7 cm tall, it would be dense and hard.

Magic Custard Cake (魔术卡士垯蛋糕)

What's magical about magic custard cake?

The cake's three layers, which are "self-made".

Pandan Kaya/Layer Cake

In the land of the half-lion, half-fish mutant, there's the half-cake, half-kueh: pandan kaya quake. 

kueh + cake = kuake = quake

Dig?

Using kueh as an icing makes perfect sense when you live in the tropics. There's no need to worry about the icing melting even when there's a heat wave. El Niño? Bring it on! No aircon? No problem!

Banana Chiffon Cake (香蕉戚风蛋糕)

If you like your banana cake very fluffy and very "banana-y", you must try my version. Other recipes may be as fluffy but not as banana-y, or as banana-y but not as fluffy.

Bamboo Charcoal Cake (竹碳蛋糕)

Black is mysterious. Black is sophisticated. Black is . . . sexy.

What makes my cake black? It's bamboo charcoal that's been pulverized into a very, very fine powder.

You can see what my charcoal cake looks like but you can't taste it. Let me taste it for you.

Matcha Cake

Green tea powder, aka matcha and maccha, is the soul of green tea cake. If you want to make good green tea cake, you have to use good quality green tea powder.

GTP has three enemies: heat, light and oxygen. The colour and flavour deteriorate very quickly unless the tea is kept in the cold, in the dark, away from oxygen.

Orange Sponge Cupcakes (香橙海棉杯子蛋糕)

Hark! Do you hear the sound of thundering hooves?

The Year of the Horse is coming!

Happy Chinese New Year! 祝大家大吉大利!

Cake Dos & Don'ts

This rather long post, for cake newbies, can be summarised in three words: Follow the recipe. Experienced bakers may change anything they like because they know what works or probably works. Beginners, OTOH, can't tell if a seemingly insignificant detail is actually a critical part of the recipe. If you're one of these, I hope this post shows you why you may want to do everything the recipe says, and not do everything the recipe doesn't say.

What to Do Before Your Cake Fails

a) Use an oven thermometer.  »

A lot of ovens aren't accurate. If the oven temperature is wrong, you have two problems. First, your cake may fail, or it may not as good as it could be. Second, if your cake fails, you have no idea what the problem is. It may be the oven temperature, or something else. If you know for a fact what the temperature is, you can at least eliminate the oven from your list of suspects.

Some recipes say "every oven is different". That may be true but one 180°C is the same as another 180°C. Whatever you're baking doesn't care what oven it's in. It only cares what the temperature (and humidity) is.

An oven thermometer measures the temperature in the oven; it can't tell where the heat is coming from. If the top heat is higher/lower than the bottom heat, your cake will fail. Fortunately, most ovens don't have this problem. If you think yours does, toast a slice of bread in the middle of the oven, on a rack at 220°C. If the top and bottom of the bread browns evenly, the oven is good.

b) Don't change the pan type.  »

Only round, square and rectangular "regular" pans made of the same material are interchangeable. The pan type goes with the recipe. It affects how quickly the batter heats up, how deep the batter is, and how much structural support the cake needs. These factors in turn affect how high the cake rises and whether it stays up there or comes back down after cooling down.

My recipes use aluminium pans. If you use dark coloured non-stick pans, your cakes will be different from mine.

c) Scale the recipe according to your pan size.  »

If your pan is bigger/smaller than the recipe's, you must scale the recipe proportionately. Of course, you could scale the recipe first, then find the proportionate pan size. How wide and long the pan is affects the depth of the batter. Deep batter rises more than shallow batter, all other things being equal.

If you don't know how to change the pan size or scale the recipe, please refer to question (i) and (j) in this post: Cake FAQ.

d) Don't replace any ingredient.  »

The only exception is flavourless oil, which may be swapped with any flavourless oil. Changing any other ingredient has an impact on the cake. Once you modify the recipe, it's yours. If you like the final product, congratulations. If you don't? It's your recipe, so you fix it.

Cake FAQ

a) Why didn't your cake rise?  »

Short answer: Because you did not follow the recipe.

Long answer:

1. Egg whites were overwhisked and inextensible.
2. Whisked egg whites, kept waiting too long, deteriorated and became inextensible.
3. Eggs/yolks were underwhisked. Didn't have enough air bubbles.
4. Whisked eggs deflated when mixed with oil/melted butter and dry ingredients.
5. Not enough eggs/whites/yolks.
6. Not enough non-fat liquids, so not enough steam to help the cake rise.
7. Batter was too thick. Thick batter was too heavy to rise well.
8. Batter was too thin. Thin batter allowed air bubbles to escape easily.
9. Too little baking powder/soda.
10. Baking powder was stale.
11. Too little acid. Baking soda couldn't activate.
12. Too much acid. Batter was set before it could rise.
13. Wrong flour type.
14. Batter was kept waiting too long before it was baked, allowing air bubbles to escape, and the baking powder and whisked egg whites to deteriorate.
15. Oven wasn't hot enough. Without enough heat, air bubbles couldn't expand, water couldn't convert to steam, and double-acting baking powder couldn't activate.
16. Oven was too hot. Batter was set before it could rise.
17. Wrong pan type, which affected the heat transfer. 
18. Pan was too wide. Shallow batter was set before it could rise.

b) Why did your cake crack?   »

Short answer: Because you did not follow the recipe.

Long answer:

1. Egg whites were underwhisked and too extensible.
2. Too much egg white. 
3. Too little flour.
4. Oven was too hot.
5. Top of oven was too hot. The crust hardened too quickly, then ruptured when the batter underneath puffed up.
6. Too much baking powder/soda.
7. Too much non-fat liquid.
8. Wrong pan type.
9. Pan was too narrow.

c) Why did your cake collapse/sink/deflate?  »

Short answer: Because you did not follow the recipe.

Long answer:

1. Egg whites were underwhisked and provided poor structural support.
2. Oven was too hot. Cake rose higher than it should, so it came back down due to insufficient structural support.
3. Too much baking soda/powder.
4. Too much acid. Strictly speaking, the cake didn't sink. The sides rose but the centre didn't, so it looked like the centre sank.
5. Uneven mixing.
6. Too little flour.
7. Underbaked.
8. Cooling down method was wrong. Fragile cakes need to cool down inverted and stuck to the pan or they would sink.

d) Why was there a hard layer at the bottom of your cake?  »

Because the batter set too slowly, allowing starch to separate and sink to the bottom of the pan, where it hardened.

Why did the batter set too slowly?

Short answer: Because you did not follow the recipe.

Long answer:

1. Oven wasn't hot enough.
2. "Bathtub", if there was a water-bath, wasn't metallic.
3. "Bath water" wasn't hot enough.
4. Not enough acid.
5. Not enough eggs.
6. Not enough flour.
7. Not enough starch.
8. Not enough cream cheese.
9. Wrong type of cream cheese, that didn't have enough starch.
10. Too much liquid.

e) Why did your cake shrink after cooling down?  »

All cakes shrink as they cool down.

Japanese Strawberry Shortcake (草莓奶油蛋糕; Strawberry Cream Cake)

Japanese strawberry shortcake is a layered sponge cake filled and topped with whipped cream and strawberries. It is what I call a ménage à trois made in heaven, because each party brings out the best in the other two.

The red and white cake is very popular in Japan, especially for Christmas. I guess having the same colour scheme as Santa Claus wins a lot of votes during the Yuletide season.

Honey Castella (Kasutera) Cake (蜂蜜蛋糕)

The traditional mould for baking Castella cake is a bottomless wooden box frame.

Where to get a Castella wooden mould?

Fluffy Chocolate Sponge Cake (巧克力海绵蛋糕)

Ladies and gentlemen, please meet my seized chocolate cake:

Seized?

Don't worry, I haven't seized anything from anyone. It's cocoa powder that's doing the seizing, not me.

Pandan Sponge Cupcakes (班兰海绵杯子蛋糕)

I like my pandan sponge cupcakes very much. Made with pandan juice and coconut oil, the little cakes are very fragrant and the green colour is totally natural. The crumb is soft and fluffy, and it's still moist the next day.

Vanilla Sponge Cupcakes (香草海绵杯子蛋糕)

The cake is fluffy, moist and not too holey. The buttercream is velvety smooth and not too rich or too sweet. The roses look reasonably like roses, and stayed that way without air-condition.

Yup, I'm happy with my vanilla cupcakes.

My sponge cupcakes are made with whole eggs, i.e. the eggs aren't separated. This method is a bit tricky because yolks and whites whisked together deflate easily when you add flour and butter/oil. Deflated batter makes cupcakes that are dense and hard.