If you listen to competitors on the top chef type shows, they talk about baking requiring such precise recipes. That's a bunch of malarky. If you have a general idea of where you are going, you can fly by the seat of your pants, adding water, shortening, and flour as needed to get the right consistency and "feel" for your dough. If the feel is right, you'll probably do OK.

There are exceptions, of course. Six weeks ago, I made a couple of loaves of bread that were real disappointments. The next day, it came to me. I forgot to include salt. And you really need to add salt before the dough rises. Salting the bread after it's been baked just doesn't cut the mustard.

You Can't Trust Recipes

What they don't say on the top chef type shows is that you can't trust recipes, because if you change brands of ingredient, you often need to adjust quantities in order to make things turn out right. I've been baking with a generic bread flour from the bulk foods department of Glenwood Foods. It's not bad flour - but when it ran short, I ran to Costco to buy a bag of Con Agra Harvest Bread ST flour.

There might be better bread flour out there, but I've not found it. It seems to make all my baking easier and result in better baked goods. Maybe there are better flours out there that I haven't discovered, or maybe it's just that the Con Agra better suits my baking habits, but in any case, it's what works for me.

The problem with buying that flour is that it comes in a 50-pound bag. I use flour quickly enough that it doesn't go bad on me, but I really need something to keep partial bags of flour in. I used to have several huge tupperware containers, ones that held 2 or 3 gallons, but they are long gone, and they cost about $12 each two decades ago. I found a small storage bin with a snap-on lid at Kmart, it looks like it might keep insects out, but when I opened the bag of flour, I used 5 cups for a batch of bread, filled my extra-large flour canister, filled the bin, and I had about 2 cups of flour left over.

What To Do With The Extra?

What to do with 2 cups of flour? I decided to make a cake. Em loved to make Texas sheet cake, but it's been too many years, and I don't remember the recipe too well, so I modified a standard yellow cake recipe.

I don't make cake very often, because Blondie isn't a big fan of cake unless it's iced heavily, and I don't care very much for cake if it is iced heavily. And Blondie likes to use my half-sheet pans for organizing things, like the fresh fruit, or the condiments, or whatever. I whined a little about that, and Blondie agreed to free up a half-sheet pan for me.

Cakes call for cake flour. It has very little gluten in it, making it more tender. I had bread flour, which had a lot of gluten in it, which helps bread stand tall, but it makes for tough cake. It's important to exercise the flour as little as possible to avoid stretching the gluten.

Mixing The Batter

I put 2 1/4 cups of the flour in the mixing bowl along with 1.33 cups of sugar, 3 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. I figured it was OK to stir those up at this point. It won't stretch the gluten if the gluten isn't set. Then I added 0.50 cup of lard, and it was mostly the lard at the top which had liquified. I started mixing, slowly. I added a cup of warm water, a teaspoon of vanilla, and on a whim, I added about 2/3 of a teaspoon of peppermint extract.

I pulled a couple eggs out of the refrigerator, which is a mistake. You should always cook and bake with room-temperature eggs, unless the recipe specifies otherwise, and I can't think of any reason why the recipe would specify otherwise. When you try to cook cold eggs, they get rubbery and tough, while starting from a room-temperature egg leads to a more tender product.

Giving It Some Lift

I had the Kitchenaid Artisan mixer on the slowest setting, but I sped it up to the 6 setting for about a minute while I greased the half-sheet pan. (A half-sheet pan is 13"x18" by 1" tall - twice as big as a 9x13 pan, but half as tall.) This pumped a lot of air into the batter. I poured the batter into the half-sheet pan and tried to spread it out level and even. With all that air in the batter, it didn't want to flow too easily, but eventually, I got it fairly level - and by then, the oven announced that it had reached 350.

I baked it for 30 minutes before pulling it out. It was just starting to turn brown on the top crust. You may prefer that it bake for 33 or 35 minutes. After 15-20 minutes of cooling, I sprinkled the top of the cake with powdered sugar, and after another 15 minutes, I cut a couple of pieces and gave one to Blondie.

It Pained Blondie

You could tell it was paining her to praise a cake that wasn't hidden under a 12" layer of buttercream, but she couldn't really come up with the courage to complain. I thought it was daggoned good. The peppermint really made the cake special. If I'd had to put a coating of chocolate frosting on it, I could have tolerated it, and although Blondie prefers any flavor other than Chocolate, that peppermint flavor would have gone well most flavors of buttercream frosting. I think that it'd be interesting to make this cake and pour a good half cup of crusted peppermint candy cane into this cake better, but even without, this was pretty nice.

And having used up that little bit of flour, the flour bin and the flour canister both closed nicely.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
buttercream frosting - cake flour - candy canes - ConAgra - half-sheet pans - Harvest Bread flour - home baking - peppermint extract - storage bins