Cake

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Cake (disambiguation).

A layered pound cake filled with raspberry jam and lemon curd, and finished with buttercream frosting

Cake is a form of bread or bread-like food. In its modern forms, it is typically a sweet and enriched baked dessert. In its oldest forms, cakes were normally fried breads or cheesecakes, and normally had a disk shape. Determining whether a given food should be classified as bread, cake, or pastry can be difficult.
Modern cake, especially layer cakes, normally contain a combination of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter or oil, with some varieties also requiring liquid (typically milk or water) and leavening agents (such as yeast or baking powder). Flavorful ingredients like fruit purées, nuts, dried or candied fruit, or extracts are often added, and numerous substitutions for the primary ingredients are possible. Cakes are often filled with fruit preserves or dessert sauces (like pastry cream), iced with buttercream or other icings, and decorated with marzipan, piped borders or candied fruit.
Cake is often the dessert of choice for meals at ceremonial occasions, particularly weddings, anniversaries, and birthdays. There are countless cake recipes; some are bread-like, some rich and elaborate, and many are centuries old. Cake making is no longer a complicated procedure; while at one time considerable labor went into cake making (particularly the whisking of egg foams), baking equipment and directions have been simplified that even the most amateur cook may bake a cake.

Chocolate brownie

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses of "Brownie", see Brownie.

Brownies with chocolate chunks

A chocolate brownie is a flat, baked square or bar introduced in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and popularized in both the U.S. and Canada during the first half of the twentieth century. The brownie is sliced from a type of dense, rich chocolate cake, which is, in texture, like a cross between a cake and a cookie.Brownies come in a variety of forms. They are either fudgy or cakey, depending on their density, and they may include nuts, frosting, whipped cream, chocolate chips, or other ingredients. A variation that is made with brown sugar and no chocolate is called a blondie.
Brownies are common lunchbox fare, typically eaten by hand, and often accompanied by milk or coffee. They are sometimes served warm with ice cream (à la mode), topped with whipped cream, or sprinkled with powdered sugar, especially in restaurants.  
History
A chef at Chicago's Palmer House Hotel created the confection after Bertha Palmer requested a dessert for ladies attending the fair; it should be, she said, smaller than a piece of cake, though still retaining cake-like characteristics and easily eaten from boxed lunches. These first brownies featured an apricot glaze and walnuts, and they are still being made at the hotel according to the original recipe.

Walnut Brownies

The earliest published recipes for a brownie like those of today appeared in the Home Cookery (1904, Laconia, NH), Service Club Cook Book (1904, Chicago, IL), The Boston Globe (April 2, 1905 p. 34)and the 1906 edition of The Boston Cooking School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer. These recipes produced a relatively mild and cake-like brownie. The name "brownie" first appeared in the 1896 version of the cookbook, but this was in reference to molasses cakes baked individually in tin molds, not true brownies.
A second recipe appeared in 1907 in Lowney’s Cook Book, by Maria Willet Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, Massachusetts. This recipe added an extra egg and an additional square of chocolate to the Boston Cooking School recipe, creating a richer, fudgier brownie. The recipe was named Bangor Brownies, possibly because it was created by a woman in Bangor, Maine. The Bangor Brownie went on to be rated 3rd in the top 10 snacks a few years later.

A bundt cake

A bundt cake is a dessert cake that is baked in a bundt pan, shaping it into a distinctive ridged ring. The d in "bundt" is assimilated into the t. The term is used chiefly in North America.
It would appear that "bundt" is derived from the German Bundkuchen (in Southern Germany and Austria called Gugelhupf, in Switzerland Gugelhopf), a ring-shaped tea-time cake. The word bundt appears as early as 1901 in The Settlement Cookbook, written by Lizzie Kander of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Bundt is used instead of bund in a recipe for "Bundt Kuchen." The aluminium bundt pan is a variation of ceramic cake forms that were used in Germany, Austria, and Hungary to make the ring-shaped cakes and was trademarked in 1950 by H. David Dalquist, founder of Nordic Ware, based in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, who developed it at the request of members of the Hadassah Society's chapter in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The old-world pans, with fluted and grooved sides, made of delicate ceramic or cast iron, were heavy and therefore difficult to use. He modified some existing Scandinavian pan designs and fashioned the pan out of aluminium.

Bundt pans

The pan sold somewhat slowly until a Pillsbury-sponsored baking contest in 1966 saw a bundt cake win second place. This prompted a scramble for the pans, causing them to surpass the tin Jell-O mold to become the most-sold pan in the United States. Since introduction, more than 50 million bundt pans have been sold by the Nordic Ware company.
The women of the Hadassah Society called them "bund pans". The German word bund in bundkuchen originated either from bundling or wrapping the cake's dough around the pan's centre holeor because a bund is a gathering of people. (In both German words, the final d is pronounced like a t.) Dalquist trademarked the word bundt, and Pillsbury licensed the name in 1970 for a line of cake mixes.
In early 2007, some of the original bundt pans were taken into the Smithsonian Institution's collection.
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Chocolate Cakes

 

Chocolate cake is made with chocolate; it can be made with other ingredients, as well. These ingredients include fudge, vanilla creme, and other sweeteners. The history of chocolate cake goes back to 1764, when Dr. James Baker discovered how to make chocolate by grinding cocoa beans between two massive circular millstones.

Choco rose cake.
In 1828, Conrad Van Houten of the Netherlands developed a mechanical extraction method for extracting the fat from cacao liquor resulting in cacao butter and the partly defatted cacao, a compacted mass of solids that could be sold as it was "rock cacao" or ground into powder.[The processes transformed chocolate from an exclusive luxury to an inexpensive daily snack. A process for making silkier and smoother chocolate called conching was developed in 1879 by Swiss Rodolphe and made it easier to bake with chocolate as it "amalgamates smoothly and completely with cake batters. Until 1890 to 1900, chocolate recipes were mostly for drinks.
The Duff Company of Pittsburgh, a molasses manufacturer, introduced Devil's food chocolate cake mixes in the mid 1930s, but introduction was put on hold during World War II. Duncan Hines introduced a "Three Star Special" (so called because a white, yellow or chocolate cake could be made from the same mix) was introduced three years after cake mixes from General Mills and Duncan Hines, and took over 48 percent of the market.
In the U.S., "chocolate decadence" cakes were popular in the 1980s; in the 1990s, single-serving molten chocolate cakes with liquid chocolate centers and infused chocolates with exotic flavors such as tea, curry, red pepper, passion fruit, and champagne" were popular. Chocolate lounges and artisinal chocolate makers were popular in the 2000s. Rich, flourless, all-but-flourless chocolate cakes are now standard in the modern pâtisserie," according to The New Taste of Chocolate.
Sourse : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_cake