Beautiful pie! What’s odd about the cake?
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So is this an ATK thing, to not give precise weights for ingredients? I borrowed their “How Can It Be Gluten Free” cookbook from the library last week and was incredibly irritated that the ingredient lists for the baked goods are presented in volume, maybe with weight in ounces, eg “X ounces (Y cups)”. That is so imprecise and so annoying, and I can’t figure out why they didn’t give gram measurements beyond a conversion chart at the back. Every other GF baking cookbook says not to measure by volume and gives weights in grams for the improved precision. <end rant!>
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I actually wrote to them asking why. Never heard back.
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I have the Cook’s Illustrated Baking Book, which has their BCP recipe, among many others, and a quick look shows that they do only supply weights and volumes in ounces rather than metric measures. Like a lot of American baking books, they don’t provide weights for butter, just tablespoon fractions of sticks, but they supply weights for flour and sugar, and for things like cocoa, nuts, cream cheese, and coconut.
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In all the books i own flour, sugar, etc is given in ounces and not metric. I so like metric better
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My kitchen scale no longer switches from grams to ounces, so anything in ounces I now have to convert anyway. The worst are all the Alice Medrich books that use ounces for the weights, with decimals to two or three places. If you’re getting that granular (and beyond where some scales distinguish), just go with grams! I have noticed that King Arthur, which used to give the option to toggle between volume, ounces, and metric on its recipes, now just lists volume and gram measurements on everything.
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I meant all my ATK books. When i buynew books i make sure there are metric weights.
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Oh yeah, I’ve converted all of Alice’s measurements to grams. I hate the ounces. Thankfully by Flavor Flours she embraced grams.
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Question for anyone smarter than me: what is meant by “baking cocoa” here - Dutch process, or natural? Does anyone have an idea?
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KA and ATK might have what you’re looking for.
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I’ll bet it just means unsweetened cocoa powder.
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Baking cocoa is natural, not Dutch processed, cocoa.
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What an obscurity, at least in American terms, given that most recipes calling for natural cocoa and most major domestic brands of natural cocoa (e.g. Hershey, Guittard, Scharffen Berger) all refer to it as cocoa powder, as do baking experts Alice Medrich and Stella Parks.
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For me, the tell was the recipe calling for a teaspoon of baking soda and no baking powder.
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Thank you!
Perhaps the worst example of this I’ve seen is in a recipe in “The Chocolate Bible” (not by RLB), that calls for a cup of cake crumbs.
I interpret this to mean that ATK has decided gram-level precision is not essential to the success of the recipe. Despite the myth that baking requires slavish attention to detail with measurements, there’s actually quite a bit of latitude within which results will still be good. It is AMERICA’S Test Kitchen and package measurements in USA are still shown in ounces (as well as grams) and ingredients measured in cups.
I think it’s an intentional effort that ATK is making to be ”American” and avoid metric measures, even as the parenthetical that other cookbooks use - ounces (grams). They are well within their rights to do that… but it’s not the way I like to bake and so I’m not inclined to buy the book. To each his/her own!
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From Taste of Home, a chocolate carrot cake. This is not a traditional carrot cake, but a traditional chocolate cake with carrots – lots of carrots. More carrots than flour, if you go by volume.
I made a ¼ recipe for a 6” cake. I did not make frosting – powdered sugar is enough for us. My carrots were coarsely grated (recipe calls for finely grated). No other changes.
This cake is great! Moist, fudgy in texture but not overwhelmingly chocolatey in taste (chocolate lovers might want to add mini chocolate chips or those De Ruijter chocolate flakes). If you closed your eyes and didn’t know there were carrots in there, well…you wouldn’t know.
Just what I was hoping for: quick, easy, scratching that chocolate itch, yet with some redeeming nutritional value. Will make again, certainly (and a bigger one, at that).
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On Friday, I made a half recipe of the spiced honey cake from Snacking Cakes in a 6” pan, with the suggested additions of diced apple (a medium-small Gravenstein), since the combo is appropriate for a Rosh Hashanah weekend. I used orange blossom and macadamia honeys (I had some small sampler jars in the pantry) and halved the brown sugar (though I could’ve left it out, as the much greater volume of honey was plenty of sweetening). The only other modification I made was to the spices, as I don’t think 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon for a half recipe qualifies it to be called “spiced.” I used 1/2 teaspoon each cinnamon and ground cardamom. No photo because the very tender, warm cake collapsed a bit when I turned it out — I made the mistake of using a rack with somewhat widely spaced bars instead of a smaller grid, and I’m sure having a relatively high volume of diced apple in the cake didn’t help. I need to source a smaller gridded rack, since my smaller racks all have the parallel bars.
Despite not being entirely intact, I was able to carefully cut and serve slices, and it was moist, well flavored, and much appreciated. I’d like to try it with browned butter instead of oil.
This is the recipe, though without the book’s metric measures. I appreciated the gram weight for the honey in this one-bowl recipe because it obviated the need to deal with measuring something sticky by volume.
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