Chapter Six: The Lighter Side of Cake

Cake, the staple dessert at birthdays, weddings and other gatherings, but more and more people are having a hard time processing gluten. But there is still hope for those out there! They don’t have to say goodbye to a favorite dessert, they can still be apart of the fun. So I have changed the plan a little bit, I was going to make a yellow cake but I decided that after the chocolate cake, I was going to get the same results. Instead I made a yellow chiffon cake, that way I can see how a low-fat cake would hold up. And for now I won’t be making both to compare because that’s a lot of cake. I will probably go back to making both to compare when I move on to more complex items.

The chiffon cake, where you mix together everything except the egg whites and one of the sugars. With a low-fat you tend to fold one substance into another. In the case of chiffon cakes you fold the egg whites into the other portion of the batter. The first step is to blend the liquids together before you shift the dry ingredients in. Once you have the eggs whipped you have a limited window to fold the two together. In the pastry world we like to do what we call, a sacrifice. You have to throw a small bit of the meringue (or other lighter substance) into the other batter to try to even out the density, that way it will be easier to fold in the rest without deflating the meringue a whole bunch. After the batter was ready, I poured, and put them in the oven.

By looking at the batter alone, I couldn’t see any noticeable differences. But once out of the oven and cooled, (in case you didn’t know, you cool chiffon and angel food upside down so it doesn’t collapse once cooled), that’s when I noticed problems. The chiffon cakes had lots of tunneling, which usually means the batter wasn’t folded properly. But my thoughts are that the gluten free flour was too heavy for a light cake like this. Even with sifting the dry ingredients together, there was particles that were still heavy enough to sink to the bottom. When I tasted it, I could tell that the texture was off, it wasn’t light and fluffy. Chiffon should be soft and a little bouncy, but the gluten free one felt more like a high-fat cake. I might be able to fix this for future low-fat cakes by shifting twice but we will have to see. And as always there was a little bit of a gritty texture and to be honest it felt very mushy while chewing. It also wasn’t as sweet as a traditional chiffon, which some may like because when you add an icing, your teeth won’t ache from the sugar overload. Next low-fat cake that I do, I am going to sift twice to see if I get a better texture. So come back in two weeks to read about my adventures with angel food.