Who Said My Cake Must Be Flat On Top?

Why Can't it have a Voluptuous Breast-like Rounded Dome?


Unlike haircuts, a flat top seems to be the fashionable way to go with a cake these days. I have even heard it said that a cake should never ever have a rounded top. This jars with my own sensibilities. I was brought up on the Victoria Sandwich and it was a matter of pride to have a beautifully rounded risen top to our sponges. In fact, a cake with flat top would have been close to having a cake that nearly sunk in the middle which would have been a shameful outcome indeed.

It was drilled into me from an early age that one should never open the oven door whilst baking the cake, especially in the early stages, or first 15 minutes, because the cake would be sure to flop. I am always proud when my cake rises high, who are these people who want to make me feel like I have not achieved the heady realms of cakedom prefection? Pah! Who needs one of these?

I had already planned this particular post when I happened to listen to Silverbrow's excellent podcast with Dan Lepard. At one point, near the end of the interview, Anthony Silverbrow asked Dan (who actually wrote the 'Breads & Batters' section in my favourite recipe book), what he thought about the impact of the internet on food. This is blogger-friendly stuff, this is high-rise cake friendly stuff, listen up people:

"[it] brings the homecook away from newspapers and magazines and allows them to talk to other people who really are doing it and especially in photography, too, on blogs you've got people baking cakes, taking recipes that they really like and photographing them with love and care and what they are doing with it, they are not trying to be a photographer so much as communicate something about the dish that they really like. Either they're really PROUD because it ROSE so HIGH or they wanted to show you the crumb structure... and blogs enable people to do that without having an editor saying 'we don't normally do things that way'. With a blog you can have an immediacy, you can say look I don't care the way things should be done, I want to say this, this way, I want to tell people that, and that is extraordinary. It is transforming our society for the better."

Dear Mr Lepard

Please may I be the first registered member of your new appreciation society?

Thank you,

love

Food | Blogging | Baking | Dan Lepard | Cakes

Who Said My Cake Must Be Flat On Top?