Today I was recipe testing for the Sponge Cake category of the local Village Show ("a sponge cake, any flavour, three egg size, no icing"). Having grown bored of the traditional Victoria Sponge, I decided to try the Larousse "Almond Sandwich Cake" on page 1012. It's essentially a whisked sponge with added ground almonds. It wasn't a complete disaster, but something went wrong at some stage, but I'm not sure what it was...
The initial process of whisking sugar with egg yolks until "fine and thick enough to form a ribbon trail" actually resulted in a very stiff mixture - as if there was too much sugar, or not enough egg yolks. (6 yolks to 250 grams sugar - I halved the recipe since it was a test batch). Whisked to a creamy colour, but it was clearly not liquid enough to form the required "ribbon trail"; my electric hand whisk was struggling to beat it. Adding the flour and cornflour to this mixture made the problem worse - the mixture became the consistency of a dough, not a cake batter. Adding ground almonds did nothing to help the dough, and it is at this stage that you're expected to fold in 5 whisked egg whites. Folding egg whites into a stiff dough is an impossible task; it resulted in a lumpy batter, so I probably knocked a fair amount of air out of the egg whites whilst attempting to get the batter smooth. (Resorted to using an electric hand whisk, instead of just folding in the egg whites). By the time the egg whites were mixed in, the consistency was about right for a cake, but a few lumps remained.
At some point during incorporating the flour into the batter with an electric whisk, a cloud of cornflour was created, and decided to settle all over my head. This became apparent upon glancing in the bathroom mirror after cooking- a thin layer of flour had also attached itself to all the fine hairs on my face, resulting in a flour-beard and grey hair.
The cake cooked relatively well. It did rise. It looks like a cake. However it is dry and crumbly, so I'm still on the look out for a prize winning sponge recipe. Also, since it's quite crumbly, a springform tin is useful, since it's easily damaged from attempting to slide it out of a standard loose-bottomed cake tin.
I'm still not sure what went wrong with the recipe; I think my weighing scales are getting old (you weigh out the amount you require, look away from the scale for a second, look back and it says something completely different). On the other hand, a bad workman always blames her tools. Or maybe my egg yolks were just particularly small.
I would say that I'm not intending to make this recipe again, but there's another ten variations on this which I will have to complete whilst working my way through Larousse. Plenty of time to get it right. Mental reminder to buy really large eggs...
Today, I also learned how to prove Expectation for the gamma distribution (X~Gamma (a, r)) = r/a Here's a link to a powerpoint which covers how to prove Expectations for all the main distributions: math.usask.ca/~laverty/S241/.../09%20S241%20Expectation.ppt
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