Part 1

Cake is a form of food, typically a sweet, baked dessert. Cakes normally contain a combination of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter or oil, with some varieties also requiring liquid (typically milk or water) and leavening agents (such as yeast or baking powder). Flavorful ingredients like fruit pures, nuts or extracts are often added, and numerous substitutions for the primary ingredients are possible. Cakes are often filled with fruit preserves or dessert sauces (like pastry cream), iced with buttercream or other icings, and decorated with marzipan, piped borders or candied fruit. Cake is often the dessert of choice for meals at ceremonial occasions, particularly weddings, anniversaries, and birthdays. There are countless cake recipes; some are bread-like, some rich and elaborate and many are centuries old. Cake making is no longer a complicated procedure; while at one time considerable labor went into cake making (particularly the whisking of egg foams), baking equipment and directions have been simplified that even the most amateur cook may bake a cake.

Cakes are broadly divided into several categories, based primarily on ingredients and cooking techniques.

Yeast cakes are the oldest, and are very similar to yeast breads. Such cakes are often very traditional in form, and include such pastries as babka and stollen. Cheesecakes, despite their name, aren't really cakes at all. Cheesecakes are in fact custard pies, with a filling made mostly of some form of cheese (often cream cheese, mascarpone, ricotta or the like), and have very little to no flour added, although a flourbased crust may be used. Cheesecakes are also very old, with evidence of honeysweetened cakes dating back to ancient Greece. Sponge cakes are thought to be the first of the non-yeast-based cakes and rely primarily on trapped air in a protein matrix (generally of beaten eggs) to provide leavening, sometimes with a bit of baking powder or other chemical leaven added as insurance. Such cakes include the Italian/Jewish pan di Spagna and the French Gnoise. Highly decorated sponge cakes with lavish toppings are sometimes called gateau; the French word for cake. Butter cakes, including the pound cake and devil's food cake, rely on the combination of butter, eggs, and sometimes baking powder to provide both lift and a moist texture

Cake baking If your oven temperature is questionable, invest in an oven thermometer. Some ovens can be off by as much as 75. Before mixing the batter, prepare the pans, turn the oven on, and make sure the rack is in the center. Shiny pans reflect the heat, and are your best choice for cake baking.

Reduce thSubstitute 8-inch square pans for round if you want, or use 2 to 3 8 X 4-inch loaf pans. The baking time will be less, so begin checking about 15 minutes before the time suggested.e oven temperature by 25 when using glass pans. Have all ingredients at room temperature for best results. Grease pans with about 1 tablespoon of fat per layer pan. Use cocoa (or carob powder) instead of flour for dusting a greased pan when making a chocolate cake.

Cake decorating Im here today to talk to you about a few basic tools for starting out in the world of cake decorating. We hope you find some great cake decorating ideas. Some of them youre going to be very familiar with. Hopefully you have them in your own home and kitchen. Others might be new to you, so well discuss them with you as we go along. Obviously your going to need an apron and icing. Decorating cakes is a very messy job so I always keep an apron around. I also find having towels is very handy. Whether Im washing or cleaning things and keeping things dry. A pair of scissors, well discuss a few uses for them. Obviously your going to need a frosting spatula. Something to scrape out the bowls when your working, when youre baking a cake you want to scrape out that batter before you put it into your pans. You need to know the how much icing or cream or whatever you're using to cover the surface of the cake. And you decide how thick it should be. From them you multiply the thickness with the surface area of you cake to get your icing/cream/sprinkles's volume. Then you prepare it and start decorating. As for decorating, you decide whether you want to make your design symmetrical or whatsoever, Eg. The positions of chocolate pieces, how many to put, how far apart... etc. That requires maths. Eg, you want to put 6 pieces of choc on the cake. 360 divide by 6. Then use trigonometry to get how far the position chocs are.