Blog: How to bake cakes and impress people

I LIKE to bake. I love the attention that showing up with a beautiful cake or dessert gets me. Along the way in life I’ve found that before I start planning what to bake, I need to ask myself four simple questions.

The first question is “Who is my audience?”. What I bake is more often defined by who I’m baking it for, rather than my own personal tastes. When I create desserts that inspire me, I often find that they fall a little flat with my friends. Lavender-infused cheesecake mousse isn’t for everyone – where I thought it was fabulous, some my friends thought it tasted like soap. Salted Caramel is also not for everyone.

There is a time and an audience for trying something a little different. If the people you’re creating for aren’t the adventurous types, don’t try and educate their palettes. Go for something a little more traditional and wow them with your execution instead.

Secondly, ask yourself “What do I want to achieve?”. What do you want your audience to think and feel about your creation? When I want my friends to take a step back and make comments like “it looks like you bought it from a shop!” then I bake chocolate cake and frost with Italian meringue butter cream (IMBC). When I want them to reminisce about home cooked meals and Nana’s cakes, I make Coconut Jam Sponge slice.

Question three is “how much time, money, and effort do I want to put into this?”. The above two examples are also good extremes to show here. The Coconut Jam Sponge slice (or Dad’s cake, as I call it, because my dad taught me how to make it) takes less than an hour to make, and is very cheap. In fact, the ingredients are part of my standing pantry that I restock as I use, so when I want to make it, it doesn’t require any additional shopping. Dad’s Cake also requires very little effort.

The Chocolate Cake with IMBC frosting should be made over a couple of days. If I do make it all in one sitting I’m looking at six to seven hours, of which I am doing something on my feet in the kitchen for almost that entire time. This should not be attempted on a Thursday night after work to take in for morning tea the next day, even if that’s exactly what I just did.

There are standard pantry items in this cake, but there are also things that I need to buy fresh every time I make it. It’s not actually that expensive to make, but if I had to buy all the ingredients in one go I’d guesstimate that it would cost me more than $50 (Dad’s cake would cost less than $10). It also requires a lot of effort, there are little to no rest periods involved with making this cake, and for several sections it requires some serious multitasking and often a second person to help do something while I’m chained to the electric mixer whipping, whipping, whipping.

The fourth question to ask yourself is “what does the cake need to endure?”. By this, I mean can you keep it in ideal conditions, or will it need to rough it a little? That lavender mousse needed to be refrigerated the entire time, so to transport it I put it into insulated containers in an ice filled esky. I couldn’t just put it in a container in the ice as I didn’t want it to start to freeze, but it couldn’t be allowed to come to room temperature either, so it was transported in a zip-lock bag, that I could later cut a corner off of and turn into a rough piping bag.

This went into a container, which went into another container that was then put on a bed of ice in an esky, and had a second layer of ice covering it. All that for 1 hour travel time. If the cake needs to travel, if may have to sit out at room temperature for a couple of hours or even all day, and it still needs to look good, and more importantly be safe to eat, you do not want to be using things like raw eggs, creams, or other delicate items that can melt, wilt or otherwise lose their shape. Hence my love of the IMBC as frosting.

Only after I’ve answered these four questions do I start looking through my recipe books, knowing that I now have a clear plan for the type of dessert that I’m going to make.