Fabian Marcu

Age 25
Past jobs,

Hello, everyone! Today, I'm going to talk to you about one of my favorite things in
the world, which is cakes. And what do you need to make a good cake? Well, first
let's start with flour. So the thing with flour is you want some, but not too much.
That is to say you want the gluten in the flour, but you don't want a whole lot of
gluten. If you have too much gluten, you wind up with bread, you wind up with
something that is chewy. So when you make bread, you're using the flour and mixing
it and developing these gluten strands, and they're going to provide the structure
and the toughness of the bread. That is literally the opposite of what we want in a
cake. We don't want a chewy cake, at least not in my taste. What you're going to
have to do with flour is you're going to try and find a flour that has a lower
gluten content. For example, the all purpose flour. I mean, it's all purpose. It's
good for cakes and it's good for breads. Most people buy the all purpose flour and
it has approximately a gluten content around 10.9%. That's compared to bread
flower. It's developed specifically for baking breads, and it has a high gluten
content of approximately 12%. I mean, if you're going to buy that fancy special
cake flour, the gluten content is only approximately 7.5%, so almost half the
gluten that you would get in bread flour. What gluten does is as it forms up, its
proteins are forming strands, and that creates bubbles that are released by a
leavening agent, which is going to be carbon dioxide. So they're going to rise
through the cake and the strands of the gluten, and the protein from the eggs and
the other things. They're all going to stretch out, rising up, making the cake
expand. If you have too much gluten, it's going to be too strong for the bubbles
and it's not going to be able to stretch out. It's going to be trapped and not
allowed to expand. So again, you want some gluten, but not too much. When we look
at the other differences between cake and bread, bread usually uses yeast. Yeast is
a biological leavening agent. The yeast cell is going to go through anaerobic
respiration, and an anaerobic respiration means that you don't need oxygen.
However, it can also go through aerobic respiration. So yeast is what we call
facultative anaerobe, meaning that if it needs to, it can go anaerobic but it can
also go aerobic. And what fermentization does, the process of anaerobic
respiration, is it's going to break down sugar and making it an ATP molecule. It's
going to stop right there, sugar gets broken down releasing CO2, and the end
product is going to be alcohol. So with bread, the alcohol just burns off when
you're cooking it, and it's not enough to make actual alcohol. Well, most cakes
don't use alcohol as is, but we also don't use yeast. There are some cakes that are
yeast cakes and are very special, very specific, but most cakes use a chemical
leavening agent, and that's what you get when you combine acid an with a base. It's
producing CO2 levels and everything rises up. Okay, now let's talk about the sweet
stuff. Now, there are different types of sweeteners, and before sugar was even a
thing or way back when white sugar was just for the rich folks, people used to
sweeten their cakes with honey and some with melasis. They may have had sugar kane
boiled down into a syrup and maybe maple syrup, but they didn't have the fancy
white sugar that now we have. Now, every type of sweetener adds a completely
different flavor profile, so whatever sweetener you use, you have to think about
the extra moisture that you're adding to the cake. If you're using a liquid
sweetener, you'll wind up with a cake that has a very, very soft and wet type of
texture. White sugar on the other hand, even if you oppose to using white sugar,
which is fine, white sugar is going to allow the other ingredients of the cake to
perform some of the proper reactions that are going to happen. So for example,
sugar bonds really well with water. It is going to pull the water away from the
protein and the stretches that are building up into flour and it's also going to
minimize the development of the gluten, but it's also going to prevent the cake
from being tough. Sugar also acts as a leavening agent in a minor respect. When you
add the sugar crystals to batter, the crystal usually cuts the batter a little bit,
which leaves a little hole for the bubbles to form up into. You have a little bit
of a leavening agent to that.