Muscovado Sugar Cake from Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain
Has anyone made this recipe? I made it a few years ago when the book was published and it didn't turn out for me. I have loved and made over half the recipes in this book, so I feel the failure of this cake was entirely my mistake. I wondered if anyone has made it and if you have any tips. I plan to try it again this weekend.
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3 Comments
Some thoughts & suggestions:
1) baking in oven that doesn't have steady temperature or whose dial doesn't reflect internal temperature. If all your other baking is turning out well, probably not a problem. If you have problems with other baking/roasting, be sure to use an oven thermometer. Or in extreme cases, have the oven tested.
2) flours vary tremendously in their moisture level. Sometimes they dry out, either on grocery store or home pantry shelves. Then when you bake with them, they absorb more moisture from the other ingredients than intended. If you can get and make the cake with freshly ground flours, that might help...and be a good test of the ratios in the recipe as written.
3) The recipe depends for rise and lightness partly on folding in egg whites/meringue. Fold in very lightly and don't mix thoroughly - too much mixing will deflate the eggs and make the cake more dense than intended.
Good luck and please let us know how your next results for this cake...
Also, maybe contact Kim Boyce on facebook, to see if she had similar feedback from other users of that recipe and can suggest fixes.
https://www.facebook.com/Kim-Boyce-282485364813/