Hesrial looked seriously at Kate, something Kate didn’t really ever expect to see. This is proper fairly cake, not the kind your mother makes either.
We’re making the real deal, the bee's knees, you get it - the good stuff. This will be so light you have to hold it down or it’ll float away. Fairies go wild for this stuff. “
“They use it to fly?” Kate asked in a question.
“Yeah, awesome hey. You see fairy wings couldn’t really create enough lift for them to fly, Look here (and a large board of what could only be maths appeared in mid air over Hesrial’s head) the power to weight ratio just isn’t right, so they need a bit of a boost, and that’s what fairy cake is for. One bite and a fairy can fly all day.”
How do you know this stuff - you said you didn’t pay attention.
Yeah, but I’m not stupid or anything. What can I say, maths and I just get on.
“Will we be able to fly too?”
“Wow that’s the dumbest thing you’ve said and I was really starting to like you and all - you don’t have wings and you weigh 40 kg.” and with that Hesrial started mumbling to himself about the stupidity of half elves.
“I can hear you” said Kate, but she knew from the smile on Hesrial’s face that she was teasing.
Ok, let’s crack on, I may not be able to fly but I love eating fairy cake just the same.
A very simple recipe appeared.
“To make a cake light” said Hesrial, “we need to trap air and keep it trapped even when we put the batter in the oven. It’s an interesting process, and here’s what’s going on.”
First, let’s look at the sugar. Sugar has a number of jobs in a cake, obviously it provides sweetness, Fairies love sweet things, so there has to be sugar, but it also helps air get into the mixture. Fairies can’t fly if the cake has no air. It’s too flat and heavy. So we need the air, and it comes from a number of places, one of them being the interaction between the fat (butter normally from Betsy the cow) and sugar. When you cream the butter and sugar together for a cake, air is carried into the mixture and caught on the edges of sugar crystals, where it hangs on tightly.
The other useful little thing that sugar does is lower the caramelisation temperature, the point at which the mixture will change colour in the heat, so you end up with that perfect firm, browned and golden top. Hungry yet?
Next ingredient then is the fat. Fat has two key functions in a cake; it is a ‘shortener’, it coats the proteins and carbohydrates in flour to prevent the formation of too much gluten. Some gluten is essential in cakes to stop them falling apart altogether, however too much can ruin the texture. A ‘shortened’ cake (one where the fat has stopped the gluten getting carried away) is crumblier than a mixture with higher gluten content, like bread for example.
The second role of fat is to help trap the air bubbles that the sugar brought into the mixture. Thin layers of fat surround the air, sealing it into bubbles, so that it cannot escape and instead must hang around to make your cake light and fluffy. Provided, of course, that the air bubbles don’t get overexcited and pop when they get hot and bothered in the oven.
You stop this happening by adding egg to the mixture. Egg proteins are so important in baking. In cakes they follow the example of the fat, and form thin layers around the air bubbles. These proteins become rigid when heated, so the expanding air in the bubbles has no means of escape. Fat and protein are an effective prison, if you’re an air bubble.
An additional means of getting air into a cake is to use a chemical baking powder, which is usually a mixture of alkali (bicarbonate of soda) and acid (cream of tartar) that reacts with heat and water in the oven to produce carbon dioxide gases that expand into the air bubbles and help the cake rise, for extra-light and fluffy goodness. The water you need for this reaction comes from the egg white.
The last key ingredient of the cake is flour. Flour gives structure to the cake and it does this in two ways. First, flour proteins link together to form gluten. Gluten forms a stretchy web throughout the cake that can expand as the air bubbles and carbon dioxide force the cake to rise, and then set rigid to stop the cake falling in on itself, which is another cake-related baking disaster that I’m definitely familiar with.
The second structural aspect of flour is the starch. Starch is involved in helping the egg proteins stay firm and strong, and preventing that all-important air from getting away.
A final addition, which always confuses people, is salt. Why, you may wonder, would you put something savoury like salt into a yummy sweet cake? Well salt helps to strengthen the gluten web, and odd though this may seem, it does also add to the flavour.
“But where’s the magic in that?” said Kate, it’s just cooking.
“We Fae call this soul magic. To do great magic you need to understand the natural magic that holds and supports all magic. Bad fairy cake is bad fairy cake and no magic will fix it. Fairies are above all creatures of love, so love and attention has to go into the cake.”
Here is a great recipe for fairy cake courtesy of the BBC
Ingredients
If You Want To....
First, preheat the oven to 180 degrees and line a fairy cake tin with cake cases.
Take your softened fat and place it in a bowl. Then proceed to beat it as if you were creaming it(DO NOT ADD IN SUGAR AT THIS STAGE).
Next, add in the sugar (make sure it has been sieved to achieve most air) and cream the two ingredients together.
Using a separate bowl (this will have to be quite large), beat the egg. To make your cakes extra fluffy keep beating it even if you think it is done. The perfect outcome would be to end up with a "blob" of "froth" but that is not an easy feat. Then, spoon around a quarter of the egg to the beaten fat and beat it in thoroughly. To achieve best results make a well for the egg and when first starting to beat it in, mix the mixtures together like you would cement. After that, pour the mix into the rest of the egg and again, beat thoroughly. if you are adding an extract to this recipe then now is the time to do it, beating into the mix.
Fold in the flour (after it has been sieved). if you are unsure as to how to do this then draw figures of eight around the bowl, coming up at the top and bottom.
As with the eggs, beat the milk but this time continue until it is a "blob" of "froth". Then, fold this into the mixture. the cake mix should be a good consistency, softly dropping off the spoon. Finally, spoon into the cake cases
Bake for around 10 minutes or until golden brown and when inserted, a skewer comes out clean. Then leave to cool.