About Baking: Cakes
Baking is on my ‘Thing to do Post-Exams’ list ever since I saw beautiful pictures of various home-baked cakes, muffins, and cookies in my friend’s Facebook pictures. I have even bookmarked a website (www.joyofbaking.com) with all these recipes for my coming mission then.
Having in mind to bake butter cake (also known as pound cake) we visited this shop that sells everything you need to bake, from ingredients to baking equipment. We were introduced with ‘easy bake ingredients’ where all the dry ingredients (e.g. baking flour, sugar, salt etc.) were mixed ready in a pack enough to bake a 1 kg cake. Dummies like us are recommended to buy this ‘easy bake pack’ before trying our hands on baking from scratch. Weighing and sifting every single ingredient is too tedious and messy!
Everything sounded so easy that we bought 3 packs (butter cake, moist chocolate cake and sponge cake mix). The salesgirl even promoted the ‘snowskin mooncake made-easy packs’ that it was hard to resist from buying. Again because it seemed so simple and the sample tasted as good as the commercialised ones.
Too excited that we baked moist chocolate cake on the evening itself.
Just mix together 500 g of cake mixture, eggs, water and some melted butter. Beat until smooth and bake at 180 degrees C for 1 hour.
Butter cake:
Cream butter until light and fluffy. Add in dry ingredients pack and beat for 1 minute until blended like this:
Add eggs slowly and cream until smooth.
Whip butter until mix well, pour into round mould.
Bake at 180 degrees C for 60 minutes or until skewer comes out clean.
_______________________________
I overdid the beating step as I was too obsessed with achieving a smooth texture. I beat for 2-3 minutes in between each added egg, and there are 6 eggs in total to add, so imagine the amount of time spent on beating. By right, I just need to add the subsequent eggs once the previously added egg has just blended in/disappeared (without the unnecessary long gap of continuous beating).
The blunder I committed made the cake end up not only extra smooth but EXTRA FIRM as well (too much beating will deflate the cake). It ended up like a giant muffin instead.
The top is really crispy when it's fresh
Giant muffin with a defect at the bottom
!Update: I tried to bake a better butter cake last Wednesday. This time I shortened the beating duration and used an oven to bake instead. I even divided the batter into 2 baking pans so that it has space to rise/expand, unlike the previous one.
Result: Still quite firm but not as bad the first.
Reason: This time I blamed on overbaking. Longer duration spent baking in the oven makes the cake dry and hard.
Sponge cake was a total failure.
At least butter cake is edible, the sponge cake failed to rise and just the top part (the skin) is edible. How sad. So disappointed that I don’t bother taking a picture of it.
Snow skin mooncake
1. Mix the pack of dry ingredients with the mini packet of oil provided
2. Measure 70g of water and add most of it together with step
3. Leave just a little to wet your hands in case the dough becomes too sticky.
4. Knead the dough till smooth.
5. Divide the dough equally into 50g each and flatten them
6. Take 100g of lotus filling and wrap with the flattened dough
7. Press it in the mould to create the patterned top and sides
The result
Supposed to make 9 mooncakes from the pack, but we ended up with 7 due to inexperience, resulting in usage of slightly more dough to wrap a 100g lotus paste). We still have leftover lotus paste in the fridge.
The result is not too bad for a dummy’s standard. 
Correct ratio of dough and lotus paste
