Where you 'do it'--matters :)

Cakes--I love to bake them--taste wise comes out just fine. But for the texture, moisture and color too-- they all turn out the same--brown, over-baked, dense mounds :( And I thought hard. Granted that I am no baker, but I can follow a recipe, once in a while. But things never quite turn up good. So this time around I decided, what I was doing wrong, or rather differently. Turned out that I never paid attention to the baking ware. That people say 9' or 8' was to me an 'irrelevant' detail. I always thought any bakeware would do.

Big mistake. Big.

Turns out that when a recipe tells you to mix such-and-such ingredients in such-and-such proportion and pour it into an 9' pan-- it takes into account the fact that the thickness of the batter in the pan will be such that when you heat it at the temperature mentioned in the recipe for the mentioned period of time, it heats the batter uniformly and throughly.  That is what matters a lot in baking. Not an irrelevant detail to be tossed out. Now you would think this was so routine that why am I even talking about it. But all you people who mess up, will find this HIGHLY useful. 

So here is one I made today. From Food network. Turned out so good!!. But I made a few changes. I used a whole orange in addition to the 2 tbsf of orange zest. I also used my electric mixer to break the almonds and mix it uniformly in the batter. But I accidentally poured 'slightly' more baking soda. So the bottom is tasting bad.

But in all, I love the cake. But you could do with a little more orange zest. That is a personal opinion

happy eating and healthy living!

Photograph by Ritayan Mitra