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Married to Night Train
- Location
- Salford, UK
I was at work!
My first thought was: Delia - her Cookery Course is a bible, and her basic how-to is complete beginner's stuff. But I know the Be-ro book is also good.
However, to help with your specifics....
Grease and flour: Coat the tin with grease (normally butter, rubbed all over the inside of the tin. Regular bakers will retain old butter wrappers to do this with.) and then a dusting of flour. Personally, I'd never flour a cake tin, I'd grease it, and then line with a disc of greaseproof paper (cut a size that is the diameter of the tin, plus the height of the sides. Snip lots of cuts in the 'extra' portion (daisy style), so that the paper fits into the tin with the snipped bits sticking up lining the sides. Or take the easy option and buy some ready shaped greaseproof or reusable liners.
Bundt tin: Not a clue.Might be a typo? I'd be using a standard non-stick shallow cake tin. Well, two, one for the top, one for the bottom. When the cakes are baked, and turned out of the tins, make them into a sandwich using jam, and maybe whipped cream, and dust the top with sugar - icing sugar, or caster sugar. If you don't have much in the way of storecupboard ingredients, just buy caster sugar, and use for both the cake mix and the dusting on top.
Cream the butter and sugar: mix, vigorously (or 'beat'). You need the butter to be softened so that you can do this (or use marg). Put butter and sugar in a bowl (a nice high sided one prevents spills), and mix with a wooden spoon, hard. This mixes the two, and also introduces a little air. You'll end up with a light coloured slightly gritty (from the sugar) paste.
Lemon zest - this is the very outer layer of the lemon rind, the bit with all the essential oil in. Under it is the pith, which is bitter. You can shave the zest off with a sharp knife if you're good at that sort of thing, or buy a basic little tool that you drag over the peel and it draws off little strings of zest. The key thing is to keep it thin, and not get the pith too much.
Beating the lemon zest refers to the fact that you're told to include it in the butter/sugar beating stage. Beating is mixing vigorously with a blunt tool like a wooden spoon. Or a handheld food mixer. You can get the electric ones, but I use one of those human powered ones with two beaters, and a handle you turn. Easier on the arms than just using a spoon.
Lemon oil: most recipes including lemon or orange will include two types of flavouring - the juice, and the oil contained in the zest, which is a more concentrated flavour. If you really didn't want to bother with the zest, you could add a couple of drops of lemon oil from a shop, but the zest is the thing that often 'identifies' a cake as lemon or orange, because of the coloured flecks you get in the cake.
Curdle: when you have your butter/sugar paste, you add beaten egg gradually. If you add slowly enough, you should continue to have a smooth paste, which will get sloppier and sloppier as you add the egg and it combines with the butter/sugar. Add it too fast, and the butter/sugar and egg won't combine properly, and you'll get a paste that looks a bit... well sort of like when milk goes bad and you put it in tea, it separates? It's very difficult to define curdle without using the word curdle, it's something you'll probably know when you see it.
Stabilising: if you do start to get curdling, adding a little flour glues it all back together again, and then you go back to adding the egg slowly.
Basically, there are two main stages: you beat together the fat and sugar and egg, in a way that incorporates as much air as you can - after all, it's air that keeps a sponge a sponge. This is the violent bit. Then, when you have a batter that's holding air, you 'fold' in the flour - stir it in a little at a time, gently, with a metal spoon or similar, using a cutting motion. This ensures the air stays in there. Pour into your tin, bake and there you are.
Or look up 'all in one' cake recipes. Not the purists' way, but perfectly satisfactory.
I quite understand it seeming alien - it's like if you tried to tell someone how to index gears when they don't know how gears work in the first place, or any of the names of the parts. But do perservere, it's a great skill to have. Ian Hislop was on the radio recently on that programme "I've never seen Star wars", and he'd never made a cake. He followed Delia, and produced a basic sponge, which tasted great, and he gave the experience 10 out of 10.
If you still find a basic sponge intimidating, you could look for a recipe for something like a refridgerator cake - usually chocolate, crushed bicuits, dried fruit etc, all melted together, flattened into a tray and then set in the fridge and served cut into squares. Rocky Road is one example, with marshmallows in.
I can vouch for CrinklyLion's cake btw. I've just eaten three of her flapjacks!
