I don’t like it when things get complicated. The most eloquent ideas are usually the simplest. Even although this ‘kate flour’ seems to work, I’ve been uneasy about its formulation. Would we really have to work through each available flour from every different country, specifying by means of trial-and-error the best microwaving times for each and including consideration of all the different powers at which different microwaves function? On a scale of one to complicated, this seemed … well … intolerably complicated.

Time to think again. How could I tell when the flour had been microwaved for long enough? I couldn’t think of a way of assessing its moisture content without knowing its starting moisture content, and waiting until it went black wasn’t really an option either. The only vaguely scientific-looking piece of equipment that I hadn’t yet used in my kitchen was a probe thermometer. So … water evaporation … temperature … I returned to my original Dove’s Farm pasta flour, heated it in the microwave for the time I already knew gave good results in baking and then took its temperature.

132 degrees C.

I scoured my cupboards. 10 0z of McDougall’s 00 grade flour took 5 minutes to reach 138 degrees C. The same amount of McDougall’s plain flour reached 134 degrees C after 6 minutes. And then, just because it fell out of my cupboard when I squashed the plain flour back in, 10 oz of Francine’s bread flour took 7 minutes to reach 136 degrees C. Now I was running out of bowls if not flour, so I decided to start baking.

First I turned each of my microwaved flours into ‘kate-flour’, substituting 1/8 of a cup with 1/2 oz of cornflour. I then made 3 Yellow Butter Cakes (thank you for the recipe, Rose 🙂 ), one for each of my ‘kate flours’.

Guess what? They all worked! Yes, even the bread flour came in as a better alternative to bog-standard, unbleached plain flour.

The plain four cake is on the top left, the bread flour cake on the top right and the 00 grade flour cake is on the centre at the bottom of this photo.

Feel free to skip this bit, but here are some specific details 😉

For each flour, I weighed 10 0z and spread this on a pyrex plate (10″ diameter) to give a bed depth of between 18mm and 20mm. I microwaved the flour for 1 minute at a time at 750W. After each minute, I took a temperature reading and then stirred the flour to break up any lumps. I continued heating the flour by successive minutes until I obtained a reading that was at least 130 degrees C.

I removed the flour from the microwave and allowed it to cool to room temperature. I then sieved the flour and discarded any residue. I spooned the flour into a measuring cup (250 ml) and leveled the top with a palette knife. I weighed the flour in the measuring cup, then calculated 7/8 of this amount to obtain a weight for the flour component of 1 part of kate flour (10 0z of flour before microwaving generally yields at least 2 parts of kate flour).

McDougall’s 00 grade flour (microwaved to 138 degrees C)
1 cup = 4 1/4 oz
1 part kate flour = 3 3/4 oz flour + 1/2 oz cornflour

McDougall’s plain flour (microwaved to 134 degrees C)
1 cup = 4 oz
1 part kate flour = 3 1/2 oz flour + 1/2 oz cornflour

Francine bread flour (microwaved to 136 degrees C)
1 cup = 3 1/2 oz
1 part kate flour = 3 oz flour + 1/2 oz cornflour

My so-called ‘kate-flour‘ has miraculously transformed my entire experience of baking from The Cake Bible this last week. Witness my Golden Luxury Butter Cake, formerly known as a soggy, dense lump of play-dough.

However, it appeared that Dove’s Farm speciality pasta flour was key to this success … and also that some people were having difficulty sourcing this in their local supermarkets. Rose asked me if the microwaving/cornflour method might work for plain flour too. If so, this would make it virtually universally possible to create ‘kate-flour’ in place of ‘cake-flour’.

Unfortunately, my baking results yesterday didn’t suggest that plain flour would work. Substituting plain flour for pasta flour in the ‘kate-flour’ treatment hailed a return to sogginess. It was disappointing, but at least we knew …

Or did we …?

Thinking things through once again in the early hours of this morning (my 6 month old doesn’t yet ‘sleep through’), I remembered that the whole point of microwaving was to reduce the moisture content of the flour being treated to about 1% to 5%. This apparently makes the starch less impervious to water and allows it to gelatinize and swell. What if I had simply failed to reduce the moisture content of the plain flour sufficiently? If my plain flour had a higher starting moisture content than my pasta flour, wouldn’t it then require a longer treatment time in the microwave to reduce the moisture content to within the desired levels?

First thing this morning, I rushed out to buy some more McDougall’s plain flour. I weighed out 10 oz, spread this on a pyrex plate and blasted it on high in the microwave for 3 bouts of 2 minutes each, stirring the flour in between. I then substituted 2 tablespoons per cup of microwaved flour with 2 tablespoons of cornflour, and used this mix to bake yet another Sour Cream Yellow Butter Cake.

It worked!

The soggy, dense lump I made yesterday with plain flour that had been microwaved for a total of only 3 minutes is on the right. The soft, melting creation I baked this morning with plain flour that had been microwaved for a total of 6 minutes is above, on the left.

Following the success of my microwaved flour as a substitute for cake flour, I was prompted by comments from fellow bloggers into thinking further about cornflour mixes. As ellaella suggested, a common method for making cake flour at home is to remove 2 tablespoons of bleached, plain (all purpose) flour per cup and to replace these with 2 tablespoons of cornflour (cornstarch). Would this still work if the plain flour was unbleached, however? And how would cakes made with a mix of plain flour and cornflour compare with cakes baked from microwaved flour?

At about 5 o’clock this morning, I was struck by a further question. What would happen if I microwaved some flour first and then replaced 2 tablespoons per cup with 2 tablespoons of cornflour? Would the microwaving be enough to compensate for the lack of bleaching?

Well, there was only one way to find out. Back to the kitchen I went.

It just so happens that yesterday I made Rose’s Favorite Yellow Layer Cake using microwaved pasta flour in place of cake flour. It turned out beautifully. Could I really improve on this?

I decided to bake two more of these butter cakes today. For the first, I microwaved 7 oz + a couple of spoonfuls of Doves Farm Organic speciality pasta flour for a total of 3 minutes on high (I have an ancient set of shop scales standing in my kitchen, so I tend to think and work in Imperial measurements). At this point, the whole experiment very nearly ended in disaster. I suddenly thought it would be easier to make up the cornflour mix if I had more microwaved flour on hand … so I popped a few more spoonfuls on a plate of their own into the microwave … and proceeded to burn the flour and melt a large hole in the bottom of the plastic plate. I guess microwaving such small amounts of flour isn’t such a good idea – be warned!

Luckily, my kitchen was still relatively unburnt (despite the smell) andI had just sufficient microwaved flour to be able to prepare a cornflour mix nevertheless. I then used 7 oz of this microwaved-cornflour-mixed flour (which seemed a bit of a mouthful, so I was coming to regard this as ‘kate flour’ instead) to make my first cake.

The flour mix for the second cake was more straightforward. I simply weighed the pasta flour straight from the bag and replaced 2 tablespoons per cup (spooned, 4.25 oz) with 2 tablespoons of cornflour.

What happened? Well, just when things were looking good, they suddenly started looking even better! The cake made with ‘kate flour’ rose beautifully and behaved exactly as Rose said it would in The Cake Bible. The cake made with pasta flour+cornflour didn’t rise quite so high and then retired to below the rim on cooling.

Inside, the ‘kate-flour’ cake (behind, on the right) had a finer texture and was lighter than either the pasta flour+cornflour (front) or all-microwaved-flour (behind, on the left) cakes.

More importantly, the ‘kate-flour’ cake definitely got my vote for taste. The pasta flour+cornflour cake was simply stodgy and … well … floury. The ‘kate-flour’ cake, on the other hand, was moister than the all-microwaved-flour cake and had even more of a melting, soft feel in the mouth. Each bite brought a delicate flavour of vanilla and left behind a subtle, lingering tang.

Perhaps with these new results, I might feel brave enough one day to use my ‘kate flour’ to bake another Golden Luxury Butter Cake … but that will be a story for another day.