Saturday, November 26, 2016

Coffee chiffon

I had 166g of cake flour which I want to finish up before the end of Spring. Summer and autumn will be too hot to bake and I don't want the flour to lie around and get stale. So I found this recipe which uses 163g of flour! Wonderful! Although I won't get to bake the black sesame seed chiffon that I was looking forward to, it's not so bad because I couldn't find a recipe particularly for a 25cm pan without adapting. And I'm petrified of adapting baking recipes. Interestingly, I noticed that this baking temp is lower than the previous tea chiffon, perhaps because there's less liquid.

Source:
http://thedomesticgoddesswannabe.com/2015/11/coffee-chiffon-cake/

Ingredients
7 eggs
117ml milk
3 tbsp instant coffee powder (reduced from 3.5 tbsp)
105ml oil
45g sugar (for the yolk; reduced from original 47g)
163g cake flour
2 tsp baking powder
110 sugar (for meringue; reduced from 117g)

Method
1) Prepare the milk coffee. Heat up the coffee to just before boiling point (small bubbles), and add the instant coffee power. Dissolve and let the coffee cool.
2) In a bowl, whisk the egg whites with the sugar until creamy.
3) Add the oil and whisk until pale, about 2 minutes.
4) Add the coffee and stir to incorporate.
5) Sift the cake flour and baking powder and add it to the yolk mixture. Beat gently just to break up the pockets of flour.
6) In a big bowl, beat the egg whites until foamy and opaque at low speed. Add the sugar in 3 additions. Turn up the speed to max and beat till just before stiff peaks.
7) Add the meringue to the yolk batter in 3 batches. The first batch is just to loose the yolk mixture so don't worry about breaking up the foam. Be more careful with the second batch and fold it in and ensure no white meringue streaks remain.
8) Finally, return the mixed batter back to the final batch of meringue. This batch, very carefully fold in the meringue, drawing the meringue from the bottom and lift to the top. Rotate the bowl as you go.
9) Pour into an ungreased pan from 10cm height. Drop the pan sharply on the counter top several times, and use a skewer to slash near the sides of the pan, or use a zig zag action. This will release the bubbles.
9) Bake at 160 deg C (no grill) for 65 minutes.
10) Once out of the oven, invert carefully onto a tin. Make sure the cake doesn't fall out (if it's undercooked. I took a risk and didn't test with a skewer)


11) This time, to speed up the cooling, I draped 2 damp towels over the pan. That cut down the cooling time by half, ie 1.5 hours.
13) Run the offset spatula around the sides of the pan and and cut as close as possible to the sides of the pan. Try to do it in one swift motion and avoid sawing. I managed to save some of the 'skin' but otherwise the cake was quite moist, which leads to its crumbly appearance.

Also, my cake didn't turn out as prettily because in my haste and excitement at having achieved the optimum oven temp, I forgot to drop the cake tin and slash the cake batter! As you can see from the pictures, there are big bubbles.
Recipe feedback: 
1) The coffee powder is important. I didn't quite like the taste but other than instant coffee which tasted a bit burnt, I doubt that brewed coffee would been strong enough. Hmm, maybe coffee essence is needed. 
2) The cake was very very moist though, altho heavier than the tea cake. This could be because I wasn't as conscientious with extract as much egg white as possible, or because there was 3g more cake flour than the recipe required, or because it used milk rather than water.
3) Compared to the tea cake, this recipe uses the same number of eggs and almost the same amounts of oil and flour. The major difference is that this one uses less milk by volume compared to the water that the tea cake uses.

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