Today’s cooking adventure is Crazy Cake. I’m learning to bake cakes, spurred by tremendous envy of the folks on the Great British Baking Show. However, I’m coming to believe that cakes are like cats—they do want what they want, when they want it. Cakes, for example, usually require fancy equipment, like springform pans, tube pans, and bundt pans. Buying cake flour is something I can live with, but I don’t want to lay out big bucks just to buy a set of fancy cake pans.
Case in point about fancy cake pans: The original Bundt pan design—along with a drool-worthy bunch of follow-on designs—goes for $38.57 on Amazon.com. Not in my budget right now.
Hence the Crazy Cake. According to Mark Bittman’s cookbook How to Bake Everything, the cake was “developed during the Depression due to a shortage of dairy products”, and “is now a godsend for vegans and anyone who loves a good shortcut”. Plus, the recipe says that it can be baked in an 8-inch square, an 8- or 9-inch round, or in cupcake tins, and I am the proud owner of two 8-inch round pans, so no need for tricky pans that I don’t have.
I noted that the recipe asks you to make 3 wells in the flour mixture, and to pour in oil, vinegar, and vanilla, in that order. (Vinegar! How much crazier can a cake get?) The 3 wells didn’t work for me, as the oil just flowed out of its well and went everywhere. And they didn’t make sense to me, either, because you just mix everything together immediately. So the 3-wells instruction seems like a needless flourish.
Also, there was an error in the recipe—not an impressive start to a new-to-me cookbook, especially from someone like Mark Bittman. The ingredients list didn’t include 1.5 cups of cold water—it’s a good thing I always read a recipe 2–3 times before starting, because the water is mentioned in the instructions. (True confessions: I penciled the ingredient into the book in order to save the next hapless library patron from baking sorrow. Or possibly baking angst. Baking fury?)
And you really should use a whisk, as the instructions say. I started out with a wooden spoon but wound up with a lumpy batter. The whisk smoothed everything with just a few turns.
The cake seemed—seemed—to bake beautifully. The recipe said to bake it for 50 minutes, but it was ready after 45 minutes in my oven, when the toothpick in the center came out perfectly clean.
But speaking of baking fury, after cooling the cake for 5 minutes, I dutifully spatula’d around the edges before turning it out onto my teatoweled hand… and it split in two—the top 3/4 of the cake in my hand and the remaining 1/4 of the cake stuck in the pan.
Is this why it’s called crazy cake? Not just the crazy ingredients, but the crazy way it turns out? Hmmm, maybe the Mark Bittman team knew it wouldn’t come out of the cake pan…. The recipe does say to let it cool in the cake pan, and to frost it in there…. Baking conspiracy theorists, please contact me. Oh, wait, I should be remembering to see the divinity in the Mark Bittman team. Working on that, be right back…. (I took a revenge-porn-bake pic to share my anguish, but WordPress Free won’t let me upload it unless it’s the Featured Image.)
After indulging in just a little bit of panic, I used the narrow silicon spatula to edge under the traitorous cake slab stuck in the pan. I finally got it completely loose, then turned it onto a second teatowel. After a little wrangling, I got both pieces of cake onto the same half-sheet–sized cooling rack.
OMG, baking should be fun, not panic-ridden!
On to Youtube for further info on Crazy Cake. Home Cooking Adventure (August 26, 2016) uses hot water instead of cold and puts all the wet ingredients in willy-nilly, lending credence to my needless-flourish theory of the 3 wells.
Furthermore, Home Cooking Adventure’s Crazy Cake recipe gave me the nerve to try my first ganache. 1/2 cup of whipping cream, check. 7 ounces of semisweet chocolate… hmmm. I have 8 ounces of unsweetened chocolate. The Chocolate Substitution Chart comes to the rescue, telling me that “1-ounce unsweetened baking chocolate and 1 tablespoon granulated sugar for every 1-ounce semi-sweet baking chocolate” will give me what I need.
…and then I realized that I only have 4 ounces of unsweetened chocolate, not 8 ounces. But whipped cream with cocoa powder makes a lovely cake topping!
All in all, Crazy Cake was A Fraught Experience, but my husband said that he really liked it, so it’s a definite win!
Tune in next week for Further Adventures in Baking!
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