My Second Cake Experience « Ngseehoe’s Weblog

My Second Cake Experience

I was free and boring throughout this week. I just had my training yesterday. It is another new project I will accept this week. It is Nestle Nesvita 3 in 1 cereal drink. My sampling will be mainly green tea variant. Hence, it will be indeed a good breakfast as I like green tea variant. Anyway, this will not be the topic I will like to discuss here. My topic of today is “steaming” cake. You must be wondering why is the term “steaming” was used. The reason behind is because steaming is the method of making the cake. The name of the cake is Chocolate Marie Biscuits Cake and it was my second experience of making cake.

For your information, the recipe was given by my auntie. She highly recommended this cake to me as it is the easiest cake and the ingredients are common to be found in the market. The recipe is as follow:-
a) 250g butter, softened
b) 200g caster sugar
c) 5 eggs
d) 250g Marie biscuits, ground
e) 2 tbsp cocoa powder

Right! The ingredients are commonly found! Thus, it will be my choice to kick starting my first trial in making cakes and cookies. I bought the ingredients yesterday and I found that the ingredients were not really expensive about RM15. The ingredients I have bought were in excess. Therefore, it still remains quite a lot for my next trial. Let’s talk about the process!

Firstly, I added butter and caster sugar and stirred it with stirrer. Perhaps, owing to the reason of I had frozen the butter; the butter is hard to be stirred. However, with my stirrer, the ingredients were mixed until creamy. The definition of creamy in my point of view is that the colour of the mix becomes whitish and the texture is smooth. Next, eggs are added one at a time and mix well. One of my observations after the eggs were added is the mixture yield higher viscosity and color changes back to golden yellow as well as the volume of mixture keeps increasing as the subsequent egg is added. The explanation from me is that egg consists of emulsifying property. Thus, the mixture will change the texture as time passed.

Thirdly, I sifted the Marie biscuit’s powder and added into the mixture to form a thick batter. After the mixture was stirred until smooth, I separated the batter into 3 portions. One of them was mix with cocoa powder. After all of the above being done, it is time for the steaming process. I pour one portion of the batter into a cake pan which greased with oil. Then, I steamed it for 10 minutes. However, I found the batter was not cook well. Thus, I steamed the batter for another 5 minutes. Owing to this is my first time of preparing this cake; I was not sure how to determine the doneness of the first layer of the batter.

I added on the subsequent cocoa batter on top of the first batter. I found that I had done a mistake that was the first batter was not cooked. And I found it rather difficult to spread for the second cocoa layer. As the first layer was soft and once I spread the second layer, the first layer was spread simultaneously. Hence, I found it rather like a rojak that mixing two different layers together.

Right at that moment, my focus was to spread the second layer thoroughly on top of the first batter. Although it appeared to be rojak in varies spots, but I still be able to finish spreading of the cocoa batter. I have once thought of throwing the cake into the dustbin. However, I told to myself that I need to finish spreading even it appeared to be unappetizing. As this was my effort for the whole morning just to stir and mix the ingredients together with my empty stomach as I was too excited to making the cake until not yet even had my breakfast at 12pm. Fortunately, the outcome of the second layer after steamed was not that terrible and even quite good in appearance. The moral of the story are persevere and focus the goal that was first initiated.

The last layer of batter was spread and steamed for about 15 minutes. One of the tips given by the recipe is that assure the first layer of batter was cooked before adding the next. However, I failed to do this and it made me quite nervous what was the outcome of my trial in steaming cake. Anyway, another tip from my personal view is that the fire to steam the cake must be big to make sure sufficient heats are given to cook the entire cake. In addition, you need to make sure your water will not dry off due to excessive heating process.

To have a look what’s the result of my first trial in steaming Chocolate Marie Biscuits Cake, I guess the photos below able to explain the outcome better than my description. For your information, the photos and the garnishes were my DIY production.