BAKE A CAKE!

Being born into a rural family, I got to taste cakes very infrequently and so I just loved cakes-that intricate delicacy I could munch upon once an year. Time flew and I grew up and my family moved to the city. Here, I found all varieties of cakes during my days out with my friends. And thus grew my interest in learning how to bake a cake on my own! I felt (still feel) every cake is a poem written by the baker.

I tried baking using the recipes that I got from internet and some random cookbooks which all turned out to be a disaster-yes, my white oven turned all yellow after a baking session and I found a dark piece of hard mixture with random holes in it. Then I set out to find where I had gone wrong and I found it! I was trying to bake a cake in a microwave oven. For baking a cake and to get the correct texture, one needs a convection oven. These days markets are flooded with ovens with 3 or more modes. But they were all very pricey. So I went for a cheaper convection cake baking oven bought from the nearby market.

My first ever cake (the end result turned to be a cake for the first time) is shown in the picture. It is a simple sponge cake that can be easily made at home. And you can make even a chocolate cake by making slight changes to this recipe.

Lets have a look at the ingredients.

butter-100gms (you can use upto 225gms)
flour-225gms
eggs-4
vanilla esssence-a tsp
sugar-250gms

Preheat oven at 180C for 10 minutes. Beat the eggs till it reaches a ribbon stage i.e. it gets thickened and bacomes paler. Cream together butter and sugar till it blends well. Sieve the flour,baking powder and baking soda and add it to the butter sugar mixture and also add the beaten eggs slowly. Mix them well and add a dash of vanilla essence. Add some milk to reduce the thickness of the mixture. Grease the cake tin with some butter and pour the cake mixture onto it. Fill only upto half of the baking tin. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes. When the cake gets cooked, a nice aroma spreads in the kitchen and also check whether it is perfectly cooked by inserting a thin stick and if it comes out clean, then the cake is ready. Leave the cake to rest for 15 minutes. After that the cake is ready to be unmoulded.

For making a chocolate cake, one may reduce the amount of flour by half and add cocoa powder instead. That yields a perfect chocolate cake.