27 February 2008

My private class with Gina

Today I have the honour of inviting Gina over to have a private class with me and my friend to learn baking of cupcakes.

Taking the opportunity that she's here, we decided to do another Chiffon Cake, just to ensure I am doing it correctly. Everything seemed fine from the time we started till end of baking. The cake rose, as usual, in the oven. We inverted the cake pan once it was out from the oven. Upon cooling, the same disappointing result faced us. The cake had dropped out of the pan and it is caved in, like my first attempt. Gina recalled that one of the books she has read showed the same picture as my chiffon cake. The cause was uneven heat of my oven. Mystery solved! So it seemed that this will be my third and last attempt of chiffon cake, at least, until I change to a better oven.

Because of this "characteristic" of my oven, the cupcakes also took much longer to bake (about 25 mins as compared to the usual 15 mins). Despite having first baked the chiffon cake for 40 minutes, the temperature still fluctuated. :( In the end, I had to remove the cooked ones from the oven before shifting the not-so-cooked ones nearer to the hot spot. Arrrgghhh.... Now I'm beginning to understand why half of my cakes always ended up as failures! Looks like I'm more suitable for bread making rather than cake making.

Anyway, these are the cupcakes we baked today. Gina taught us how to use a basic recipe to create different delicious recipes. We did a chocolate chip version (more for the kids) and a lemon zest version (which smell heavenly!)



And this is the second version of the Cream Cheese Bread that I baked yesterday, a healthier wholemeal version. Still as soft and fluffy. I'm going to try to further improvise it before sharing the recipe with you.



Mood: blank

8 comments:

Yuri said...

hey wf, all the best to your attempt to perfect the cream cheese bread recipe. be sure to share it when ready. i'm thinking of borrowing my friend's breadmaker instead of letting it sit idle in her storeroom lol

KWF said...

don't worry yuri, will definitely give a diagnosis once my experiment is done (left with one final stage). I need a healthier version since I'm making bread almost everyday. I think you should borrow the breadmaker from your friend if it's becoming a white elephant in her house. Make good bread out of it and who knows, you may ignite her interest again. :)

Anonymous said...

Lucky you, can have a private lesson and a teacher in your house to identify your problem. Was it expensive? Where does Gina normally teaches, can you give me her website. I wish I can go for class too, but with a 6 month baby, a 4 year old boy and a hb who travels frequently, baking at home it's a luxury for me now.

KWF said...

meg, you can checkout Kitchen Capers (KC) to see the classes Gina conducts every month. Baking classes are usually at Chef's Secrets (Bukit Merah), cooking classes may be at her place (hougang). Most of her classes involve DIY (unless otherwise stated), hence I find her charges reasonable. And she's usually very generous with sharing, so you learn a lot more from her. You can email her to find out about her private classes. Private classes will, of course, be more expensive, but you'll also learn a lot more. Like my case, if I didn't have the private class with her, I'll probably be still figuring and wasting time and money trying to find out why my chiffon cake and other cakes always fail.

Edith said...

Hi, you have been tagged. Check it out Hi Hi, you have been tagged. Do check it out. http://preciousmoments66.blogspot.com/2008/02/long-story.html

Rei said...

Hi kwf

You've been tagged. Pls check it out here.

Yuri said...

Hi wf, you've been tagged, again. Happy Meme-ing, check it out here http://yuribake.blogspot.com/

KWF said...

Thanks, Edith, Rei & Yuri for your tags. It really took me a whle to finish them!