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.

My earliest experiences of baking were guided by my Mum and her well-used copy of the Be-Ro Flour Home Recipe book. When I left home to study music at University, I received my own copy of the Be-Ro book. It was duly filed away until one day several years later when I decided it might be fun to make a birthday cake for my husband.

It would be nice to be able to say that this was a turning point and that I became an avid baker after the birthday cake. Unfortunately, this was not to be. I used the only cake tin I could find in our house. It was a huge, deep affair and the cake I made in it struggled to rise to even a finger-width. Undaunted, I simply repeated the process and sandwiched my two flat discs together with strawberry jam. My husband was very polite and I didn’t attempt any more cake-making until my elder daughter’s first birthday nearly four years later.

Children have a way of changing your life completely. I bought 50 Easy Party Cakes by Debbie Brown and for the next three years, I made exactly one cake each year. I then doubled my output and made exactly two cakes in the year following the birth of my second daughter.

The recipes for the cakes themselves were secondary to their appearance. Indeed, Debbie Brown advised making a firm cake that was able to stand up to modeling, so I followed her instructions meticulously and never regarded the actual baking-part of the endeavour as anything particularly troublesome. I was more worried about whether the bits were going to stick together or whether the icing would drop off when I moved the cake.

As my children grew, I discovered I held a conviction that they should be introduced to the joys of baking. I still wasn’t very clear at this point what the actual ‘joys’ were, but I believed we should set out to find them nonetheless. Somewhere between the fairy cakes and iced biscuits, I began to realize there was a vast landscape of uncharted territory lying before us. Why was it a Bad Thing if the mixture curdled? What was the reasoning behind the seemingly endless permutations of baking powder and bicarbonate of soda? Why on earth were we told to hang some cakes upside-down to cool? Surely someone somewhere was having a laugh!

Then Rose Levy Beranbaum stepped into my life. Or, to be more precise, I came across her book, The Cake Bible in a second-hand shop in Kirkcudbright. At last, I had found a map for that mysterious realm of cake-making. Moreover, this particular map had been written especially for me! (or rather, for me and the rest of the UK population, since the copy I was holding was the 1992 British Edition of the Bible).

As Rose herself explained in an interview:

“When I started to cook and bake I was very frustrated by unexplained instructions and dictates. When I chose to ignore some I discovered why I shouldn’t have; with others, I saw that there was no reason to have followed them. I wanted to empower the reader to make his or her own choices if they so desired. This can be done effectively only when one understands the reasoning behind the technique. Of course the recipe will work just fine as it is but some people like to make variations and when it comes to baking, you really need to know what you’re doing when you make changes.”

Not only does Rose finally illuminate the mysterious behaviours of flour, sugar, butter and eggs, but she also provides a foolproof method for the production of the most heavenly cakes you have ever tasted. With The Cake Bible by my side, I have successfully brought forth no less than five delicious creations from my oven in the last week alone. And I haven’t even ventured into the icings and fillings sections of the book yet!

Needless to say, my family and friends are also full of gratitude to Rose Levy Beranbaum. Perhaps now, when my children look back on their own steps to Parnassus, they will remember that their earliest experiences of baking were guided by their Mum and her well-used copy of The Cake Bible.