Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Let's bake a cake!

 Mom, Nancy, let me "help" with the baking when I was pretty young.  My oldest baking memory involves using a hand mixer and chocolate cupcakes.  I don't mean an electric hand held mixer, I mean the rotary mixer, powered by your hand.  Something like this...
What I really remember was that the batter started out a rich dark chocolate and after a few minutes of turning the crank the batter had fluffed up in size and was a light mocha color.  Those cupcakes overfilled the cupcake tin while baking, must've been all the air I was pumping into that batter.

Another memory burned into my brain from that day was my Uncle Kenny remarking that the cupcakes were the "best" he'd ever had.  That was it...I was hooked.  The recipe was from Betty Crocker's Cookbook, .  I wore that recipe out!

Learning to bake was also a side lesson in math.  What do you do when you need 2 cups of flour and all you can find is a 2/3 cup?  Use 3 measures of the 2/3 cup.  All I have is a teaspoon and the recipe calls for 1 tablespoon.  Fill up the teaspoon 3 times and then 1/3 full. 

Another life lesson learned while baking was patience, as in  wasiting for the cupcakes to cool before frosting.  Favorite recipe, also from Betty Crocker, creamy white frosting. 



Mom gave me a copy of the Betty Crocker's Cookbook when I headed off to college.  I'm not sure what happened to that copy, maybe a former room-mate took it in error.  Did I lend it to one of my kids? 

I recently bought myself another copy, different cover, hope it has the same chocolate cake recipe!



Other places to search for cake recipes:  Allrecipes.com or Cooks.com




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