Making cakes is a real art, and in order to achieve real heights in it, culinary specialists spend many years practicing. But tell me, what woman would not like to please her family with a delicious and incredibly beautiful cake?
In fact, such a desire is feasible, since making cakes at home is quite possible. Where to start and what culinary tricks you need to master in order to feel confident in this matter?
Types of Cake Dough
Before you embark on the difficult path of the pastry chef, you should understand a little about the types of cake layers. There are quite a lot of them (about 10), however, at the beginning, the three most common ones will be enough for a beginner master:
They all differ in ingredients and cooking methods.
Cooking Biscuit
Many housewives will probably call the biscuit one of the most capricious types of dough and will be right in their own way. The fact is that this variety of cakes requires careful observance of the rules, this concerns the quantitative composition and sequence of stages.
Before making a biscuit cake, you should prepare all the necessary ingredients for this. As a basis, you can take the classic biscuit recipe:
- large chicken egg - 4 pieces;
- premium flour - 100 g (about 4 tbsp.spoons with a slide);
- sugar - 150 g (on average there will be 5 tbsp.spoons with a slide).
- you can add a little vanillin or a bag of vanilla sugar if you wish.
Such a volume of ingredients is enough for 1 small cake with a diameter of 18-20 cm. It will turn out quite high, so after baking it can be safely cut into 2 or even 3 cake layers. If the baking dish is large enough, you can increase the volume of the ingredients or make several separate cakes.
Now you can start preparing the dough. How to make a sponge cake lush and beautiful? There are several tricks for this.
Secrets of making biscuit
- Cookware should be perfectly clean and dry.
- Squirrels must be separated from the yolks and whipped separately from each other.
- Squirrels begin to beat at minimum speed without sugar. When the mass increases in volume, sugar is gradually poured and the speed of the mixer is increased to a maximum (in this mode, beat for 5-7 minutes). In total, half the total sugar is added to the proteins.
- The remaining half of the sugar and vanillin (optional) are added to the yolks. Beat the mixture with a mixer for about 5 minutes. During this time, the volume should increase, and the sugar grains will completely dissolve.
- ⅓ The proteins are spread to the yolks and mix very carefully, the sifted flour is sent there. The remaining proteins are added at the end of the batch.
- The oven by this time should be preheated to 180 degrees. Bake the cake for 30 minutes.
- After baking, do not rush to remove the biscuit, it is better to leave it for a few minutes in the open oven turned off.
Important! In the first 20 minutes you cannot open the oven door. In this case, the biscuit settles and turns out unbaked.
Sand cake
At first glance, a cake made from shortcrust pastry seems quite simple and devoid of all sorts of frills. However, do not hurry to draw conclusions. Properly selected cream perfectly soaks the cakes and makes them soft and tasty. They will literally melt in your mouth. How to make a cake like this?
The list of ingredients contains:
- butter - 200 g;
- eggs - 2 or 3 pieces;
- sugar - half a glass;
- flour - 2 or 2.5 cups;
- baking powder;
- vanillin (you can refuse it if you wish).
- Beat eggs slightly with a whisk and carefully pour into a container where dry ingredients (sugar, flour, baking powder and vanilla) are prepared.
- Butter should be soft enough for easy kneading. It is chopped into pieces and laid on flour.
- All the ingredients are chopped with a knife until the dough turns into small crumbs.
- A ball is formed from the resulting mixture, covered with cling film and sent to the refrigerator for a couple of hours.
- After that, the entire volume of the dough is divided into 3 parts and rolled out of each cake with a thickness of 0.5 cm.
- With a fork, pierce the cakes in several places, put one of them on a dry baking sheet and bake in the oven for about 5-10 minutes at a temperature of 180 degrees. Repeat with the remaining cakes.
Cream with condensed milk, sour cream and custard are perfect for such cakes.
Puff cakes
For many people, puff cakes are invariably associated with the Napoleon cake, although the classic recipe for this treat with puff pastry is completely unrelated. This can be explained as follows: the preparation of this cake requires a lot of effort and quite a lot of time. Mistresses prefer to cook such complicated dishes on holidays. As a lightweight recipe for instant cooking, puff pastry began to be used. How to make Napoleon cake from puff pastry?
For the manufacture of the following:
- margarine or butter - 250 g;
- flour - 3 cups;
- ice water - about ¾ cup;
- salt - half a teaspoon;
- apple cider vinegar - about 1 tbsp. the spoon.
- Oil or margarine is pulled out of the refrigerator so that it warms slightly and becomes slightly soft. Water, in contrast, is put in the refrigerator.
- The oil is divided into 3 parts.
- Several ingredients are mixed: vinegar, salt, water and flour.
- The resulting dough is rolled into a rather thin layer and lubricated its entire surface with one part of the oil. The cake is rolled up or rolled up with an envelope. The workpiece is removed in the cold for 15-20 minutes.
- Repeat 2 more times.
- Small pieces are cut from the dough and rolled cakes, the thickness of which does not exceed 2 or 3 mm.
- The cake is pierced with a fork and sent to the oven for about 15 minutes.
Before making a Napoleon cake, you should consider the filling. Custard, protein and sour cream creams are perfect here.
Cooking butter cream
As you can already guess from the name, the basis of any cream that belongs to this category is butter. Due to its dense texture, this cream perfectly retains its desired shape. This feature is highly appreciated in the confectionery art, as making cake decorating from butter cream is a pleasure.
Flowers, bows, inscriptions, intricate patterns - the scope for imagination is simply enormous, while decoration will require a minimum: the cream itself and a pastry syringe with nozzles. As for the recipe, there are quite a few of them. A cream, consisting of:
- 200 g butter;
- 4 glasses of powdered sugar;
- 1 sachet of vanilla sugar;
- 2 or 3 tablespoons of milk (their amount depends entirely on what consistency of the cream you need to achieve).
When choosing ingredients, special attention should be paid to the quality of the oil. It should not have any extraneous taste, smell or brackish taste, because all this will affect the cake.
The preparation of the cream is reduced to beating softened butter with powder until a homogeneous mass is obtained. First, beat the butter with a mixer (this takes about 5 minutes). The powder is not poured immediately, but gradually, all the while, you should continue to work with the mixer. Almost at the very end, milk is added. After this, beat the mass for no more than 30 seconds.
How to make custard cake
In the list of the simplest and most delicious creams, one cannot but mention custard. This recipe is worthy of attention of every housewife, because custard is quite simple to prepare and is suitable for soaking cakes for cake, filling wafers, baskets, tubes, and as an independent dessert. The only drawback is the rather fluid consistency, which does not allow the use of such a cream for decoration.
To cook the cream you need to purchase:
- granulated sugar - about 300 g;
- milk - 1 l;
- eggs - 4 pieces;
- flour - 100-120 g;
- butter - a little (20 g will be enough);
Having dealt with the composition, you should understand: how to make a cake. According to the recipe, you need to mix milk with sugar in a saucepan and cook it over low heat until the sugar grains are completely dissolved.
While the milk is heating, eggs and flour are mixed in a bowl until a homogeneous consistency is obtained.
Pour 2 boilers of boiling milk into the egg mixture, mix thoroughly and add two more. After that, the pan is sent again to the stove.
Cook such a cream before thickening. In this case, you need to constantly stir it with a whisk.
Remove the pan from the stove and cool.
Sour cream
Delicious delicate cream based on sour cream and sugar is what you need to soak sand, puff and many other types of cakes. To cook such a treat is made from sour cream with a high percentage of fat content (from 30%). Only in this case it is possible to achieve the correct consistency and to avoid spreading.
However, this option of impregnation has one significant drawback. Housewives should take care of this even before making the cake. Sour cream is a perishable product, so there is no point in preparing it in advance. It is prepared immediately before the cake is soaked.
Cake assembly
Many housewives, examining the work of masters, ask one and the same question: how to make beautiful cakes. The real confectionery gurus emphasize: a special approach requires not only the preparation of cakes and cream, but also the assembly.
You need to start by giving the cakes the right size.
- Sand and puff cakes should be customized in shape and size immediately after baking, while they are still quite soft and do not crumble much.
- It is advised to collect the biscuit in the form, simultaneously smearing the cakes with cream. In this case, it will take very little time to adjust the shape of the cake.
Mastic decoration
The decoration for the cake may be different. Among the options: cake design with butter cream, sprinkling the top with crumbs or nuts, using mastic. I must say, decorating the cake with mastic has become an independent confectionery direction, a kind of art. It is from mastic that the craftsmen manage to fashion various figures, which makes the cake turn into a true work of art.
What needs to be purchased before making a cake with mastic?
- Marshmallow (chewing marshmallow) - 200 g;
- small powdered sugar - 500 g;
- water - 2 tbsp. spoons;
- butter - 0.5 teaspoon.
It is worth noting that marshmallow mastic is very popular due to its simplicity and good ductility.
How to make cake mastic
Marshmallow (it is better to take them white) is placed in a container, pour 2 tbsp. tablespoons of water and a slice of oil. Oil will add plasticity and will not allow the mass to stick to your hands. The container is placed in a water bath and the marshmallows are constantly mixed. When heated, the mass will increase.
When the consistency in the container becomes homogeneous, the container is removed from the water bath and kneading begins. In this case, gradually add powder and interfere with a spoon. After thickening, the mass is kneaded by hand on the principle of kneading dough.
The result should be an elastic enough thick dough that can be used immediately, but can be wrapped in cling film and stored in the refrigerator for up to several weeks.
How to make mastic for a color cake? To add color during the kneading process add a few drops of food coloring. Another option is to paint the finished decoration with a paint (using a regular brush).
So, is it difficult to learn how to make cakes? Like any occupation, confectionery art requires practice, but basically there is nothing particularly complicated in this process. Any woman can prepare a luxurious cake for the holiday, which will surely surprise her guests.