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ventaWell, as some of you may recall my task last weekend was to work out how to make beer cake. Cake which tasted like, and contained, beer.
Preliminary results from the beery-cake investigation board are now in.
I'd initially only thought of including beer, but several people suggested using hops or malt in cooking. Mostly, the internet lamented at me how many brew shops had closed down in my area. However, step forward the Mattock Lane pharmacy, purveyor of minor quantities of brewing supplies. I came home with a bag of crystal malt, a bag of Goldings hops and (courtesy of Ealing's most outré health food shop) some malt extract.
To work!
I thought before I started putting my newly acquired ingredients into things, I'd better find out what they tasted like. Crystal malt? Crunchy, malty... I wouldn't want to eat a bucketful, but it's quite a pleasant taste. Hops... hoppy, a little bitter, aaaaaargh! Definitely do not put whole hops in things :)
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hjalfi's superior google-fu had turned up a recipe for beer muffins with hop icing, which sounded pretty promising. I set some hops to steep while I got on with making a spiced beer cake.
Which is when I realised why I hate using American recipes. I'd got my cup measures out, and was even willing to forgive the recipe wanting a fifth of a cup (my smallest measure is a quarter). However, the recipe wanted me to dissolve the sugar in "a bottle of beer".
Um, my nice bottle of Ringwood's Old Thumper is almost certainly not a standard-issue American bottle. Google tells me an American beer bottle is 12 fl. oz. Fortunately, I'd picked the measuring jug which is only labelled in US fl. oz., thus saving myself from a potential problem.
Beer and sugar? Ooh, fizzy.
(Also very sickly. Yes, I tasted it.)
Next, I needed wholewheat flour. Is that plain or self-raising? Google for American flour terminology. Try to work out if "cake" or "all-purpose" is the default. Consider the raising properties of 1 tsp baking soda and 1 bottle beer. Decide on plain. Get baking powder out of cupboard. Wait! Baking soda... is that baking powder or bicarb? Google. Bicarb.
Argh! So yeah, US recipes. Probably great for US folks. Hard work for Brits.
Anyway, I bashed the cake mix together, and put it in a tin. It had that slightly worthy, sullen look of vegan cake everywhere. The sort of cake that will never rise, and is only distinguishable from hessian using DNA testing.
Which just shows how much I know. I popped it in the oven, and it rose like a royal bastard, eventually forcing me to shout for assistance as I tried to detach it from the grill element and move the oven shelf down.
Wow. Tall cake.
So, while all that was going on I was making the hoppy muffins. The recipe got me a stiffish eggs-butter-sugar-flour sponge mixture, which you then slacken with 3 tbsp of the water in which your hops have been steeping. The liquid tasted strongly hoppy, but when the cakes came out of the oven they tasted pretty much like sponge cake.
I drizzled more hop-water over them, and then iced them with glacé icing made up with hop-water. I don't really like glacé icing that much (it always tastes of icing sugar) and appear to have subconsciously made it with too little sugar... it was absorbed into the cake. A sprinkle of crystal malt on the top, and we're good to go.
Lastly, I made a malt loaf after reading a discussion on such topics here. (I'd confidently expected my Marguerite Patten bible to have a malt loaf recipe in it; it failed me.)
The recipe wanted 8 tbsp of malt extract. Malt extract is likely golden syrup, but without the co-operative spirit. Getting 1 tbsp out and into a bowl is a fight, 8 is a hopelessly sticky experience. I ended up gummy to the elbows. When I am dictator, all quantities of syrupy substances will be measured by weight.
This malt loaf was quite clear that it wanted wholewheat self-raising flour; I didn't have any. In a spirit of wild experimentation, I used white self-raising and subbed in an ounce of crystal malt. Would that be too strong a taste? Would the weight of it drag the cake down? Who knows!?
Also, I used dates and mixed fruit instead of raisins and sultanas. Mostly because I like dates.
The malt loaf came out of the oven a little less tall than expected (aha, maybe that crystal malt/SR flour switcheroo wasn't a good idea).
In the way of its kind, it went into a tin to mature for a few days before being tested.
While the malt loaf was baking, I'd decided that the spiced beer cake was a bit... brown and bland (thought quite beery). So I made some buttercream with malt extract in it, and slapped that in the middle.
As an afterthought, I simmered some Badger Brewery Hoppin' Hare down to syrupy proportions and spread it on the top as a glaze. After I'd done that I licked the spoon. My friend Katie doesn't like hoppy beer, she has a clearly defined "too hoppy!" facial expression. Tasting my cake glaze, I could tell I was making the too hoppy! face. I've never seen it from the inside before :)
(Anyone trying this, be warned: simmering down beer goes from "nope, nowhere near, will be ages yet" to "abort! abort!" in a matter of seconds. When you are not looking.)
So, the beer muffins and the spiced beer cake with malty filling went to work with me for test driving.
Sadly, as beer cakes, the muffins were a total failure. Fresh out of the oven, they tasted of cake. Sprinkled with hop-water and iced, they tasted of damp cake. Not quite good cake, but very like cake where something had gone very slightly wrong.
The spiced beer cake went down rather better, though at least one person commented that the hoppy glaze on the top was too bitter. (Actually, in a cake context, I rather liked it.) Several people commented on how beery the cake was (in particular how beery it smelled), so I'm willing to chalk that up as a success.
It is quite heavy and bready in texture. If you were just trying to make cake, rather than cake that was specifically beery, putting fruit in and cooking it loaf-shaped to slice and butter would probably be nice.
The malt loaf is a perfectly decent malt loaf; it's a bit dense, but that's kind of what malt loaf does. It's not significantly beery. And the crystal malt really didn't bring much to the party: you can taste it very faintly, but mostly it seems to have made occasional mouthfuls a little gritty[*].
So... I think the winner so far is the spiced beer cake with malty filling. Though having taken it in to work, I am reminded what a mess cake gets into when you let people loose with a knife. Accordingly, I may make some form of butterfly-bun version of it instead. In general I am against the cupcakisation of everything, and think the world should have more Proper Cakes in it, but in the interests of not ending up with a roomful of drunken rapper dancers covered in sticky buttercream, buns it is[**].
Many thanks to those who offered advice. Any mis-application of that advice is entirely my own fault :)
[*] Some of you baking types are probably saying things like "duh" and "well, of course it wasn't going to work". I quite often see people writing about baking, and they always seem to do the most outrageous things... "I was making this cake at Chrismtas, so I swapped the eggs out for tinsel". I think ha! That'll never work... oh, apparently it did.
So my initial reaction to the idea of making 6oz of SR flour into 5oz flour + 1oz crystal malt was that it probably wouldn't work. And actually, it was OK. But on balance, probably not a great thing to do.
[**] Just to be clear: the roomful of drunken rapper dancers is unavoidable. It's the other bit I'm trying to stay away from.
Preliminary results from the beery-cake investigation board are now in.
I'd initially only thought of including beer, but several people suggested using hops or malt in cooking. Mostly, the internet lamented at me how many brew shops had closed down in my area. However, step forward the Mattock Lane pharmacy, purveyor of minor quantities of brewing supplies. I came home with a bag of crystal malt, a bag of Goldings hops and (courtesy of Ealing's most outré health food shop) some malt extract.
To work!
I thought before I started putting my newly acquired ingredients into things, I'd better find out what they tasted like. Crystal malt? Crunchy, malty... I wouldn't want to eat a bucketful, but it's quite a pleasant taste. Hops... hoppy, a little bitter, aaaaaargh! Definitely do not put whole hops in things :)
hjalfi's superior google-fu had turned up a recipe for beer muffins with hop icing, which sounded pretty promising. I set some hops to steep while I got on with making a spiced beer cake.Which is when I realised why I hate using American recipes. I'd got my cup measures out, and was even willing to forgive the recipe wanting a fifth of a cup (my smallest measure is a quarter). However, the recipe wanted me to dissolve the sugar in "a bottle of beer".
Um, my nice bottle of Ringwood's Old Thumper is almost certainly not a standard-issue American bottle. Google tells me an American beer bottle is 12 fl. oz. Fortunately, I'd picked the measuring jug which is only labelled in US fl. oz., thus saving myself from a potential problem.
Beer and sugar? Ooh, fizzy.
(Also very sickly. Yes, I tasted it.)
Next, I needed wholewheat flour. Is that plain or self-raising? Google for American flour terminology. Try to work out if "cake" or "all-purpose" is the default. Consider the raising properties of 1 tsp baking soda and 1 bottle beer. Decide on plain. Get baking powder out of cupboard. Wait! Baking soda... is that baking powder or bicarb? Google. Bicarb.
Argh! So yeah, US recipes. Probably great for US folks. Hard work for Brits.
Anyway, I bashed the cake mix together, and put it in a tin. It had that slightly worthy, sullen look of vegan cake everywhere. The sort of cake that will never rise, and is only distinguishable from hessian using DNA testing.
Which just shows how much I know. I popped it in the oven, and it rose like a royal bastard, eventually forcing me to shout for assistance as I tried to detach it from the grill element and move the oven shelf down.
Wow. Tall cake.
So, while all that was going on I was making the hoppy muffins. The recipe got me a stiffish eggs-butter-sugar-flour sponge mixture, which you then slacken with 3 tbsp of the water in which your hops have been steeping. The liquid tasted strongly hoppy, but when the cakes came out of the oven they tasted pretty much like sponge cake.
I drizzled more hop-water over them, and then iced them with glacé icing made up with hop-water. I don't really like glacé icing that much (it always tastes of icing sugar) and appear to have subconsciously made it with too little sugar... it was absorbed into the cake. A sprinkle of crystal malt on the top, and we're good to go.
Lastly, I made a malt loaf after reading a discussion on such topics here. (I'd confidently expected my Marguerite Patten bible to have a malt loaf recipe in it; it failed me.)
The recipe wanted 8 tbsp of malt extract. Malt extract is likely golden syrup, but without the co-operative spirit. Getting 1 tbsp out and into a bowl is a fight, 8 is a hopelessly sticky experience. I ended up gummy to the elbows. When I am dictator, all quantities of syrupy substances will be measured by weight.
This malt loaf was quite clear that it wanted wholewheat self-raising flour; I didn't have any. In a spirit of wild experimentation, I used white self-raising and subbed in an ounce of crystal malt. Would that be too strong a taste? Would the weight of it drag the cake down? Who knows!?
Also, I used dates and mixed fruit instead of raisins and sultanas. Mostly because I like dates.
The malt loaf came out of the oven a little less tall than expected (aha, maybe that crystal malt/SR flour switcheroo wasn't a good idea).
In the way of its kind, it went into a tin to mature for a few days before being tested.
While the malt loaf was baking, I'd decided that the spiced beer cake was a bit... brown and bland (thought quite beery). So I made some buttercream with malt extract in it, and slapped that in the middle.
As an afterthought, I simmered some Badger Brewery Hoppin' Hare down to syrupy proportions and spread it on the top as a glaze. After I'd done that I licked the spoon. My friend Katie doesn't like hoppy beer, she has a clearly defined "too hoppy!" facial expression. Tasting my cake glaze, I could tell I was making the too hoppy! face. I've never seen it from the inside before :)
(Anyone trying this, be warned: simmering down beer goes from "nope, nowhere near, will be ages yet" to "abort! abort!" in a matter of seconds. When you are not looking.)
So, the beer muffins and the spiced beer cake with malty filling went to work with me for test driving.
Sadly, as beer cakes, the muffins were a total failure. Fresh out of the oven, they tasted of cake. Sprinkled with hop-water and iced, they tasted of damp cake. Not quite good cake, but very like cake where something had gone very slightly wrong.
The spiced beer cake went down rather better, though at least one person commented that the hoppy glaze on the top was too bitter. (Actually, in a cake context, I rather liked it.) Several people commented on how beery the cake was (in particular how beery it smelled), so I'm willing to chalk that up as a success.
It is quite heavy and bready in texture. If you were just trying to make cake, rather than cake that was specifically beery, putting fruit in and cooking it loaf-shaped to slice and butter would probably be nice.
The malt loaf is a perfectly decent malt loaf; it's a bit dense, but that's kind of what malt loaf does. It's not significantly beery. And the crystal malt really didn't bring much to the party: you can taste it very faintly, but mostly it seems to have made occasional mouthfuls a little gritty[*].
So... I think the winner so far is the spiced beer cake with malty filling. Though having taken it in to work, I am reminded what a mess cake gets into when you let people loose with a knife. Accordingly, I may make some form of butterfly-bun version of it instead. In general I am against the cupcakisation of everything, and think the world should have more Proper Cakes in it, but in the interests of not ending up with a roomful of drunken rapper dancers covered in sticky buttercream, buns it is[**].
Many thanks to those who offered advice. Any mis-application of that advice is entirely my own fault :)
[*] Some of you baking types are probably saying things like "duh" and "well, of course it wasn't going to work". I quite often see people writing about baking, and they always seem to do the most outrageous things... "I was making this cake at Chrismtas, so I swapped the eggs out for tinsel". I think ha! That'll never work... oh, apparently it did.
So my initial reaction to the idea of making 6oz of SR flour into 5oz flour + 1oz crystal malt was that it probably wouldn't work. And actually, it was OK. But on balance, probably not a great thing to do.
[**] Just to be clear: the roomful of drunken rapper dancers is unavoidable. It's the other bit I'm trying to stay away from.
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no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 11:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 11:08 am (UTC):(
no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 11:56 am (UTC)(and I also made the mental switch when first reading it)
Maybe there needs to be a TV series called Baking Bad?
no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 11:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 11:12 am (UTC)Cheese and marmite savoury muffins, however... :) Definitely on the to-try list.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 01:03 pm (UTC)Does it have way more sugar in than I think, or is this a kind of glutinous paste?
no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 01:25 pm (UTC)I'd call the thing it reduces to a syrup, in that it is like-the-original-liquid-but-thicker. I'm not quite sure of your definition of glutionus paste, though...
no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 01:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 02:48 pm (UTC)You can also chemically kill off the yeast, and back-sweeten to get a sweeter finished product (rather than an explosion waiting to happen) - but that's more commonly done with things like fruit wines rather than beers. Empirical evidence advises me that just continuing to add sugar, in the hope that the yeast will poison themselves with the rising alcohol content, doesn't reliably kill off the yeast... ;)
no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 03:20 pm (UTC)I remember (many years ago)
no subject
Date: 2013-03-09 09:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 03:25 pm (UTC)I did hope that you could make cake filling with just butter and malt extract, but the consistency was all wrong. I put surprisingly little icing sugar in, which seemed ok at the time but went a little buttery in a very hot office; definitely need a bit more for the next version.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 04:37 pm (UTC)Would an Ovaltine malt loaf taste beery, though?
no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 07:53 pm (UTC)I couldn't stop laughing. I know that cake.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-07 08:14 pm (UTC)I had a beer chocolate the other day. Worked surprisingly well, though the beer taste was quite fleeting.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 10:00 pm (UTC)(Um, weird things that happen when you suddenly start reading someone else's journal; I should say I'm a home brewer. And if you were going for malty icing again, there is a very fine dried powder version of malt extract, usually sold as DME where that stands for dried malt extract but no-one bothers saying it in full, which might work well and can be easily bought off of the internet for not too much.)
no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 12:25 pm (UTC)I'd certainly be interested to try making the icing with DME just to see - but the goopy malt extract icing actually came out pretty nice.
I don't think there's any problem with the premise of beer and muffins together. I just think the method in the recipe I used wasn't a good idea. I shall also be doing further experimentation, I think :)