GENERAL RULES.
BY J. E. WIHLFAHRT.
In making cakes, after the proper selection of ingredients, the respective quantity to be used is of great importance; and the binding material, or the ingredient which binds the different materials into the solid mass, when they come into contact with the heat during the process of baking cakes, deserves first attention. Flour, of course, ranks as the principal binding material and practically is the cheapest material, used in bulk, with which the cake-baker has to deal, and is the one that, by its judicious use, will cheapen or otherwise increase the cost of manufacture.
This is due to the fact that a cake mixture, generally speaking, should be held as soft as possible, as a stiffer mixture would require additional ingredients in order to make the product of the same standard quality, and as flour usually is the cheaper ingredient, then it follows that a stiffer mixture would either decrease the quality of the product or increase the cost of manufacture. Thus the various ingredients principally used in the manufacture of cakes are proportioned in the following way as to their binding qualities in a cake mixture:
Taking as a basis a “pound cake mixture” consisting of one pound each of sugar, shortening, eggs and flour, and it would be desirable to cheapen this mixture by adding, say, milk and flour, it would be necessary to add the milk and flour in even proportions, and for each two ounces of milk and flour so added one-sixteenth of an ounce of baking powder would be required additionally, or in its place a proportioned amount of soda bicarbonate and cream of tartar, which, in this case, would be one sixty-fourth of an ounce of the former and one thirty-second of an ounce of the latter.
Should we continue to add flour and milk and repeat the aforesaid amount eight times, we arrive at a cake mixture calling for one pound each of sugar, shortening and eggs, but one pint of milk, two pounds flour and one-half ounce of baking powder, or an equivalent amount of soda bicarbonate with cream of tartar.
Should we further desire to reduce the cost of manufacture, in purpose not only to reduce the selling price, but also to increase the volume of expansion to a given weight of such cake, we reduce one egg and, correspondingly, two ounces of shortening, and this necessitates to again increase the amount of baking powder one-sixteenth of an ounce for each egg and two ounces of shortening so reduced from the original recipe, which in this case again would be the pound cake mixture.
If we follow by reducing this amount four times, we have a recipe calling for one pound sugar, one-half pound shortening, four eggs, one pint milk, two pounds flour and one ounce baking powder, or a recipe which is the general basis for loaf cake mixture.
This intimates that one ounce of flour has the binding quality for one ounce of milk, if added to a mixture. Again, one egg will correspond in binding quality to two ounces of shortening; that is, one egg, (figuring the average weight of eggs as two ounces each) would correspond to two ounces of milk in binding power, and flour would find its own weight in shortening, and as one egg has the binding quality of two ounces of flour, we may add one egg, and reduce the corresponding amount of flour, which, by producing a softer mixture, increases the quality of the product at the minimum cost of manufacture.
Shortening, in general, (by which I refer to butter, lard, oils or vegetable fats) and eggs have the tendency, when properly incorporated in a mixture, to lighten the cakes, that is why they are creamed together with the sugar, but the same as sugar itself, they have a shortening effect to enrich the cake.