FLAVORINGS—These ingredients have their own exact réle to play. They can be very widely varied.

We count upon extracts of good quality to do the greatest part of our cake- flavoring. Try to know something about those that are available, and have enough kinds on your pantry shelf to let them add interest through variety. Do a little blending yourself, by combining two flavorings which ought to go well together— you'll get some tricky results that way! Incidentally, even where quite other types of flavoring dominate a batter (fresh orange or lemon, for instance, or spices or jam, etc.), I have found that a little vanilla helps, rather surprisingly, to point them up.

Fruits, fruit juices, grated rinds of citrus fruits, nutmeats, the various syrups, chocolate, spices, molasses ... these and other ingredients bring definite flavors to our cakes. They help us to give our basic batters an untold number of identity-changes.

SALT—This is an ingredient I have not yet mentioned—’though it is most apt to go into the batter with the flour. Its amount is small—but its responsibility is considerable. The salt used is a very important factor in bringing up and bringing out all the good flavors of the other ingredients. Without salt, the best mixture you could make would be in danger of tasting flat.

ACCESSORY INGREDIENTS—There are many ingredients which find their way into cake batters, to play very important parts—in fact, some of them have most to do with giving a cake its own special identity.

Dried fruits, along with candied peels, glacé fruits, fruits in syrup, etc., go all the way from providing a light fruiting for a light batter, to making up the bulk of a whole cake mixture, with little more rich batter added than will suffice to hold the fruits, etc., together.

Fresh fruits have been mentioned already—we know the treats that come under such headings as banana cake, orange cake, etc.

Coconut ... chocolate or cocoa: .. various cereal products which are used as

well as flour... nutmeats ... everyone is familiar with the distinguished cakes such special ingredients make possible.

TO MAKE A BUTTER-TYPE CAKE

(1) Remove eggs, milk, shortening, etc., from refrigerator an hour ahead of baking time.

(2) Prepare your oven in sufficient time to allow it to reach the desired tem- perature (see Lesson 1). It is important to have the correct temperature for the type of batter you are baking—as we said before, too high a temperature will cause cake to rise to a peak in the centre, crack on the surface, have too heavy a crust; too low a temperature will produce a rather heavy cake of poor volume.

(3) Cut a sheet of waxed or other paper to fit the bottom of the pan—an easy way to do this is to place the pan on the paper, mark around the pan with a pencil, and cut the sheet just inside this line; place paper in pan. Brush the sides of the pan and the paper with melted butter or shortening.

(4) Collect utensils.

(5) Set out remaining ingredients required.

(6) Sift an approximate amount of Monarch Pastry Flour... a little more than you will need.

(7) Measure, mix and sift the dry ingredients as recipe directs.

65 LESSON 9

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