Sunday, May 18, 2008

Practice Makes Perfect

You must be wondering what's the corelation between this picture and the title. Following the success of the Banana Chiffon Cake, I was so elated that I kept trying different flavours. The one flavour that I wanted to try was chocolate. From the near success of the White Mocha Chiffon Cake, I was determined to try a chocolate flavoured one.

Sad to say, I tried baking a chocolate flavoured chiffon cake TWICE, without success :( I followed closely to Rei's recipe, adding only more sugar.

My mistakes? For the first try, I was in too much of a hurry. I rushed home from work and set about weighing the ingredients and beating the yolks then the whites. I did all these before I had dinner. I learnt from this experience, never to rush a chiffon cake. Even though it rose beautifully, it was under-cooked.

For today's experience, I reminded myself not to rush through the process. I took my time and did everything according to how it's suppose to be done. I even checked the oven temperature and timing meticulously. However, I thought I got a whiff of something burnt in the air! Since the cake has risen reasonably high, I decided to lower the temperature a little. I increased baking time by another 5 minutes. I even let the cake cool inverted, in the warm oven, with the door ajar, for another 5 minutes before taking it out to cool, inverted of course. I only unmoulded the cake after more than 1.5 hours. Guess it's not meant to be as it was still under-baked! I will try again, but probably with another flavour. I bought some pandan leaves, perhaps I should try something that I had near success, huh?

Back to the picture, for the 2 attempts outlined earlier, I needed 10 eggs. Lo and behold! One of the eggs yielded 2 egg yolks! Wow! This was my second encounter, my first happened on my birthday. My daughter had her first encounter last night when she ate one hard-boiled egg with 2 yolks. She was tickled too.

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