Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

I had a craving for lemon cake today. I have no idea why, but while I was encoding some CDs this evening, I suddenly thought: "wouldn't it be nice to have some lemoncake?". Being an uncurable hyperactive, of course, I set out to make a cake immediately.

In the cookbook I once borrowed from my mother and forgot to give back (sorry!), I looked for 'lemon cake' in the index. Lucky for me, it had an entry, so it seemed likely that my craving would be satisfied.

Good thing I am no stranger to cross-referencing. The ingredients for a lemon cake were, apparantly, batter for a cake, and juice of a lemon. That sounded incredibly logical! Making a lemon cake, I learned, involves making the batter for a non-specific cake, described on the previous page, and adding the juice of the lemon mentioned in the ingredients before putting the batter into the mould, which is a procedure described as part of the instructions for baking a non-specific cake.

So I set out following the instructions for a non-specific cake. This cooking business is very much like debugging software: you get sent in all directions at once.

Then the trouble began!

Ingredients for a non-specific cake:

Per egg: 35g butter, 50g flour and sugar, 1-2 bags of vanilla sugar.

There are some problems with this: they don't mention how many eggs you need, only that you need certain quantities of other stuff per egg. They also make no mention of how you'd go about calculating the number of eggs you might need. Additionally, they mention 'bags' as a unit of vanilla sugar, they don't tell you how much of this sugar should be in those bags. Given that I only found bags of 10g of this substance, I hope that that's the amount they mean. Otherwise, I have a problem.

The procedure for baking a non-specific cake, then, is like the procedure for baking a '4x4 pastry' (whatever that is), only you put the batter into a rectangular mould, smeared with butter and sprinkled with flour, rather than into a round mould, similarly adorned.

Looking at the ingredients for a '4x4 pastry', I was faced with a resource conflict. A '4x4 pastry' is made with:

4 eggs, 160g butter, 250g flour, 250g sugar, 2 bags of vanilla sugar.

Aha! I now know how many eggs I need, though there's no mention about how this number was calculated. The 250g of flour and sugar also don't fit with the quantities for non-specific cake (4 * 50g != 250g). We have conflicting quantities for the butter and the vanilla sugar too. In the ingredients for the non-specific cake, the butter is a variable calculated from the number of eggs times a constant 35g. The '4x4 pastry' instructions tell me to use a constant 160g. Which do I use? I went for the 160g, because that would empty my container of butter. The vanilla sugar is another conflict. I went for two bags because the stuff is fairly expensive and there's probably a reason they put it in such small bags too. Using 4-8 bags seemed a bit excessive.

Anyway. I now have a cake in the oven, which I hope is going to turn out alright, despite the conflicting instructions for manufacturing the batter. I intend to send a letter to the publisher of the cookbook asking them to be a bit more clear in their instructions. There is no mention in the introduction of the book -- or anywhere else for that matter -- about which set of instructions should apply when there are conflicts. I imagine that seasoned cooks would know this from experience, but I don't. I use a cookbook because I'm not an experienced cook, and I need all the help I can get.

In another twenty minutes, I'll know how good the instructions were...