The days of confinement forced by Covid-19 will be known in the future as the era of the sponge cake. Is there anyone who hasn't tried it? Flour consumption has skyrocketed and everyone has brought out their baking streak. But, when we get our hands on the dough we realize that even the simple cake, which only needs four basic ingredients to sweeten our lives, has its secrets. We spoke with Betina Montagne, a long-time Venezuelan pastry chef and tremendously didactic teacher to tell us what we go wrong when this dessert is too dry, crumbly or with little volume.
“There are only three factors involved: you have to master the technique very well, control the quality of the ingredients and have the right oven,” tells us the expert who has been caught in the worst of situations by the coronavirus crisis. She is about to open her Wonder Cookies store in Barcelona with a Catalan partner, where she will make high-end pastries dedicated to catering. “I have turned the situation around and advanced the last phase of the project, which was online sales to consumers, and you can now find some of our cookies on the purchase page.” Furthermore, “I am giving more classes online than ever and it is very nice to see how a digital community is created where everyone comments on how the sweets turned out and does collective tastings on the screen.” So if you want yours to be the best cake in the video conference, here are the 12 mistakes you should never make.
1. Not calculating the proportions of the ingredients correctly
There are many cake recipes, but the most basic one has a very easy to remember recipe. “It is the so-called four quarters, a quarter of each of the four ingredients,” says Betina Montagne, who was part of the triad of judges for Bake Off, the pastry contest that Mediaset broadcast last year. That is, to get a 1 kilo piece, we will use 250 grams of sugar, and the same amount of flour, egg (4 eggs) and butter. It has no loss. And as always, good quality will guarantee a good result.
Another fundamental requirement before getting our hands on the dough is that the ingredients are tempered, “an egg fresh from the refrigerator, which is from 0 to 4 degrees, is of no use to us,” says the pastry chef.
2. That the butter does not have the necessary temperature and percentage of fat
Creaming the butter is the first step in making a sponge cake. We must have it at about 22 degrees Cº, the ideal room temperature before starting to beat it for 5 minutes until it is very fluffy. We can assemble it with manual beaters or with an electric mixer at medium speed. “It is very important that we do it well because by injecting air it will double or triple its size and the flour, sugar and egg will enter those alveoli that appear and can be emulsified,” says Betina Montagne. For it to rise well, the proportion of fat that butter must have is 82-85%, “normal supermarket butter.” Betina is not in favor of replacing it with margarine "because butter melts at 25 degrees and the human body breaks it down more easily than margarine, which melts at a higher temperature."
3. Add the sugar very quickly
Once we have beaten the butter well, it is time to add the 250 grams of sugar. The secret? “Sprinkle it in the form of rain so that it can penetrate the air gaps,” says the pastry chef who owns Wonder Cookies, a 200-meter space where artisanal delicacies come out without preservatives. We must emulsify the sugar for 7 minutes with the butter until it mixes well. We can do it with electric rods but also manual ones. “I tell my students in the bakery to work with their arm, or is it that if there is no mixer you are no longer a pastry chef?” Betina jokes with her sweet singing voice. She comes from a family where gastronomy was always present, and her aunts and her mother were also very good pastry chefs.
4. Mix the eggs all at once at a low speed
The egg is the natural emulsifier that will bind the fat to the solids. It must be at 18-20 ºC so that it can emulsify well. The 4 eggs, which are better to be size M, should not go into the bowl where we are making the cake at the same time, but rather one at a time. “Every time we add one, we mix it at low speed but we immediately increase the speed of the mixing because if we are afraid and we do it with little effort, the emulsion can be cut,” explains the energetic Betina, who, after going through an important workshop in New York, has worked alongside Oriol Balaguer and has been a teacher at Espai Sucre.
We do not add the second egg until the first is well integrated, and so on with the next, until finished. “The egg will prepare the mixture for the flour to enter.” Final texture must be satin and shiny, it is a cream without lumps. Bright, fluffy yellow.
5. Not taking into account the type of flour we use
The most common flour, medium-strength wheat flour, is excellent for making a cake, says Betina. But if we are intolerant and do not digest it well, we can use others such as whole wheat, spelled or buckwheat. Now, if we do so “we will have to hydrate them with about 80 grams of milk.”
If we want to use rice flour or potato starch flour or tapioca starch we have to mix them with corn flour "because it will give them the structure that they don't have," says the pastry chef.
We will work the flour, which must always be sifted before using, with the mixer at low speed or by hand "so that the gluten and the cake appear and grow well in the oven." We do it with a spatula or tongue. “Halfway through mixing we stop for a moment to lower the flour from the sides, and once well mixed, we beat for a final minute at medium-high speed.”
6. When do we add the vanilla or lemon zest?
The touch of vanilla or lemon zest will complete our cake, giving it a very tasty flavor nuance. “I like to add Verecruz vanilla, from Mexico,” Betina tells us, adding it when she adds the first egg to the mixture because it impregnates the cake more with its flavor. “I split the pod in half, scrape it with the tip of a knife, and place that center into the emulsion.”
If we prefer lemon zest, we must keep in mind not to use the white part of the fruit because it is bitter, and also wash it because in times of coronavirus, it does not hurt to take hygienic precautions: "In Latin America we are very used to preventing food contamination by washing the fruits with water and a little food bleach,” explains the pastry chef, whose father had a restaurant business in Venezuela where she was in charge of the pastries.
We will incorporate the lemon zest when we add the eggs or even the butter: “the essential oils of the citrus will be impregnated with the fat very well during the blending.”
7. Add yeast if it is not necessary or choose the one that is not appropriate
If we use wheat flour and emulsify the mixture well, “it is not necessary to add baking powder or baking soda to make our cake because the dough will rise on its own,” says Betina Montagne. Now, if we have not worked our dough thoroughly, we can use this resource, taking into account that bread yeast is not the same as chemical or pastry yeast, which does not require time for the dough to rest (like bread) but rather that acts with the heat of the oven. “We are not making a bread dough that rises, develops gluten, rests and doubles in size, we are making a whipped dough,” argues the pastry chef.
When is it strictly necessary to use chemical yeast or some substitute? “When our cake contains milk or yogurt, it is essential to use 5 grams for every 120 grams of flour.” We place it at the time of adding the flour. For a one kilo cake, a 125 gram yogurt is good. “We will add a tablespoon of yogurt and a tablespoon of flour when mixing, until the liquid is gone.”
8. Not using the right mold
It may not seem like it matters, but the choice of mold can mean that our cake does not come out perfect. “If our cake does not contain chemical yeast, we should use a rectangular-shaped mold, the typical ones for making plumcake, so that it rises evenly and remains spongy,” explains Betina in detail. If we use a round one we can even cause the structure to break.
Once chosen, we must place a piece of baking paper (a reusable and non-polluting element) before introducing the dough or spraying it with an anti-grease spray. Our expert does not like to cover it with butter and flour because we may end up with a thicker layer than we want to achieve, we increase the calorie content and we also waste material.
9. Do not preheat the oven and turn on the fan
That the oven is warm when our mold goes in is perfect. “You have to turn it on 10 minutes before because we need heat for the dough to react, cook and fluff whether it is baking yeast or not,” says Montagne. It is very important that the oven heats the cake equally from above and below, and it is a big mistake to use fans because it will dry it out and lose stability. “Steam is important for baking, because it enriches the preparations with humidity,” explains the expert, who recommends ovens with this function, and remembers that grandmothers made cakes in a pot in a bain-marie when the oven did not exist.
In this sense, if we make a cake with dairy products, we enrich it tastefully and also provide it with that beneficial moisture. The correct cooking temperature is 170ºC. A cake needs between 45 and 60 minutes, depending on the strength of the oven.
10. Open the oven wide and prick the cake with a toothpick
Be careful with opening the oven many times to check how our work of art is turning out. “If we do this, we will cut off the work that the heat is doing by cooking the entire batter and the cake may become caked or even remain raw inside,” explains Betina.
So, do we use the famous toothpick to poke the cake and see if it comes out dry and then we deduce that it is ready? Neither. “That's like making a wound, I open a hole ahead of time, I release the air inside and ruin it!” explains the Venezuelan expert. Furthermore, the toothpick technique is misleading "because the cake, with its butter and egg, is a creamy preparation, "the toothpick can come out wet and we may think that it still needs to be cooked when perhaps it is already ready."
Well, what do we do? Very easy. After 40 minutes, when the cake is already quite cooked (about ¾ of the way), we can open the oven and check its internal temperature once by puncturing it with a digital thermometer. “We'll see how long it takes to reach 91º C, which is the ideal temperature for the cake, and if it hasn't reached it yet, we'll put it back in the oven. “Probably at that point there will only be little left to do other than baking the top layer.”
11. Do not rest the cake on its side and unmold it poorly
Once finished, we take out the cake and let it rest for an hour and a half to cool. Betina likes to eat it hot when the flavors and aromas are more intense, but it is more reliable to know if the cake has turned out perfectly after the required rest time (an hour and a half) because "when it is cold we can more reliably check its properties." organoleptic properties".
The baker advises letting it rest on one side "so that the weight of the cake does not knock over the baking." It seems silly but if you place it vertically you run the risk of it coming down more easily, especially if you haven't made the emulsion perfect.
To unmold it, you don't need a knife. If we have put baking paper on it, it will come out well when it is cold. If not, it is better to do it when it is warm, putting it on its side, removing the mold back a little, and “above all, do not hit it to prevent it from breaking. You have to treat him like a girlfriend,” says the friendly Betina.
12. Store it too long without freezing
Once finished, we can coat it with melted chocolate (when it is cold) or sprinkle it with powdered sugar, although our expert considers that it is adding sugar for free to the daily consumption of the human body. "If we want to give it color, it is better to add something that awakens the palate such as pieces of red fruits, dried fruits macerated in alcohol and drained, or aromatic herbs at the end of the flour mixture."
If we have leftover cake, we can keep it at room temperature (as long as it is not too hot) covered with a cloche to preserve it from cross contamination and to maintain humidity. If it is hot, it is better to put it in the refrigerator well covered in a taper and it will last about 10 days. There is no problem freezing it. “Wrapped in plastic wrap it can last up to three months and is preserved very well.”
