A Piece of Cake

The title of this post is extremely deceiving. What I am going to say next is NOT at all a piece of cake. Prior to today, I have never tried baking a cake from scratch. I have always been the ardent supporter of Betty Crocker cake mix. However, after hearing the successes my colleagues attained with the recipes of this particular cook book, I was inspired.

Just as I thought I had understood the recipe well, I actually made a mistake by sifting both the flour and icing sugar together, when it should have been the flour and baking powder. I was glad that I realized the error very early on and threw the first batch of sifted flour away and started all over again.

The book was not very clear on when I should add the lemon zest and the vanilla extract. Thus, I used my own imagination and for a while, I thought I got it wrong as my mixture looked nothing like what was shown in the book. By then, I was already quite frustrated and questioned my rationale for wanting to bake a cake. But I decided to persevere and continued beating the mixture till the consistency seemed decent enough.

Then came the even more difficult part of folding the beaten mixture with the sifted flour. I have no inkling what and how a folding action should look like and again I depended on my own imagination. Finally the cake is ready for baking. After 50 minutes, I am ashamed to announce that my cake didn't manage to rise. Nevertheless, the inside of the cake is soft and fluffy, not to mention that it is extremely fragrant too, so much so that it permeates through the entire house.

Although it is not a successful cake, I don't think this is going to be my last lemon vanilla pound cake. I shall continue to experiment and find out more about the techniques of baking. But for now, I shall have my cake and eat it.