(No, no, not that. Only if you see three Wise Men and a Star in the East...)

I hate to cook, but I don't mind baking to an extent, so when I was asked to make a cake for a work function, I said yes. We had several cake mixes in the cupboard and I could try out the new bundt pan I'd bought at Linens'n'Things a few months back.

Let's say my last few efforts at making even cake mix have been uninspiring. I had a cheap aluminum bundt pan and every cake I turned out of it fell apart. The last was a spice cake for our Epiphany party; I sprinkled powdered sugar on the largest part of the wreck and called it "Helm's Deep." The few people who tried it said it was okay, but I was embarrassed.

The problem may be my effort to use substitutes to make it low fat. Most of our friends are watching their weight and I made the cake with only one egg and egg substitute in the form of soy flour and water. Amy Dacyshyn swears by this and says it makes a good tasting cake, but it didn't hang together worth a darn. Also, we use vegetable spread, not butter, and this is what I greased the pan with. It's mostly water and probably contributed to the mess.

The cheap bundt pan's doom was sealed when it developed some type of metal sliver on the inside--I've never heard of aluminum "splintering" but that's what this puppy did--and cut one of my fingers. Out it went and I used a 20% off coupon to buy a Cephelon (???) one.

So I tried preparing the chocolate cake mix I had. Since it had been sitting in the cupboard awhile, I thought the baking powder already in the mix might have lost its tincture. I therefore placed about 1/4 teaspoon into the mix of some baking powder I later discovered expired last year. I also used two eggs instead of three, and substituted the heaping tablespoon of soy flour/tablespoon of water for the third. We'd had the soy flour awhile, but it was in a closed sealed jar and smelled fine.

When I got the cake mixed, however, something was definitely wrong. When I make a devil's food cake, I expect it to smell like chocolate. This had an odd scent--not a bad scent, mind you. It didn't smell acidic or spoiled or musty or weird, but it had a peculiar scent I can only describe as "vegetably." I started to lick the batter and had the same problem: it didn't taste like chocolate. I can't describe the taste, but it wasn't cocoa.

I dumped the entire mess down the sink and started again. We had a new Duncan Hines spice cake and I made that instead, with the full complement of eggs since I wasn't sure the problem was old cake mix, old baking powder, or old soy flour.

And since we had butter in the house I greased the pan with that instead of the vegetable spread.

It baked 40 minutes and turned out of the pan beautifully after it had cooled. So what was the problem, I wonder, on the others? I had, earlier, successfully baked cakes with the soy substitute; it's just lately that they were falling apart? Was it the pan? The grease?

Whatever. I can see we need to toss out that can of baking powder, at least (we have a new one; I just couldn't find it) and get a new supply of soy flour...

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:20:00 AM

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