A SWEET EXPERIENCE

I am telling you that this year I was thinking of doing something different and with which to help us financially at home, and also to have something to do in another country in a possible departure from Venezuela, something to do in another country to earn money to live there, something that I can work on my own, I am one of those who thinks that we should take the good things from here to live outside. All the good knowledge we get here will serve us for any opportunity.

After so many mind turns, I came up with the idea of making pies, cupcakes, bread and everything related to the bakery world, and why not?

The first thing I did was put my imagination and my quality of creative marketing to create a logo, it makes me laugh this because I already had a logo for my new business, but never in my life had made a cake. I came up with the name of Mr. Poirot's Cupcakery & Café, in honor of a character from Agatha Christie's novels, and why? Well, I'm a fan of those novels and especially the Belgian detective.

As I told you, never in my life had I tried previously, for me it was always easier to eat them than to make them. Today I dare to write about this experience, because I achieved the expected result. The first time I tried it, the basic sponge cake didn't fit as I expected, I'm not saying it was bad, but I didn't have the softness I had felt in cakes I had eaten. As I told you, it didn't look bad and that gave me the opportunity to try again, this second attempt was not so often followed by the first because of the situation in the country, it was a little difficult to get the ingredients, but by inventing it I managed to gather them together keeping something from here and something from there. My second attempt can be said to have been one step lower than the first attempt, that is, the sponge cake was crushed and I don't lift anything. There I asked myself: is this really what I really want to do? The truth is that the critics that I had that afternoon to give me their opinion of the results told me that I had been super good taste and consistency, hahahahaha those critics I love them, they are my children, and although in my opinion did not get the result I wanted, for it was the best thing they had tried. Moreover, these critics don't eat candy very often and that affected their judgment hahahaha.

After this test I asked for help, I remembered that one of the kitchen cabinets was a cookbook called WHAT TO COOK? Volume 2. There I found on page 294 Spongy Cakes. From there copy the basic recipe of the vanilla sponge cake, also copy the variables of this recipe, that is, write down the recipe of the sweet chocolate sponge cake, cocoa sponge cake, walnut sponge cake, coffee sponge cake and others....

5 eggs
3/4 cup of sugar. 180g.
1 cup all-purpose flour. 115g.
1/2 tsp. baking powder. 1g.
3 tbsp. melted butter. 45g.
3 tbsp. cocoa. 21g.
3 tbsp. vegetable oil. 10ml.

This past Thursday the 15th of this month I prepared for a new attempt to make a cake, I already had my ingredients ready and a new recipe.

After lunch that day, at 3:00pm we started, I say we started because that day my daughter Rosmelys was there to help me.

The first surprise was an indication that everything would be different this time around, when we placed the 5 eggs and sugar in a bowl and I started beating in the water bath. Those 2 ingredients in the bowl were appreciated as a minimum, incredibly with the beating of that mixture was growing in a way that I even thought the bowl would be small, there in a bain-marie I was beating about 5 minutes, and after that time I took the mixture to continue beating until cooling, my expression was: ... this look's good... hahahahaha.

Then add the rest of the ingredients: flour, baking powder and everything else.

We put that mixture in a refractory glass mould, which had little use until now, at 175°C the oven, would only be waiting 35 minutes to see if it had been as I wanted it to be.... to wait.

At the 25th minute came the test of "Wooden stick" Wow...! What a soft and fluffy sponge cake... already at that moment I wanted to take it out of the oven because of the emotion, but there were still 10 more minutes to go.

Minute 35 of cooking, it's time to take my cake out of the oven, which looked really good, but I still had to wait 5 minutes to take it out of the tin. In those 5 minutes was coming my second challenge of the afternoon, the preparation of the Chantilly Cream, a cream that on a previous occasion did not get me to get the point of snow, plus that I had added CMC to thicken and nothing at all.

With the 3 egg whites in another bowl I began to beat, but before continuing I must tell you that here I learned a trick from my daughter Rosmelys to separate the yolk from the egg white, Rosmelys used a small plastic bottle of mineral water, squeezed it a little bit, brought the peak of the bottle to the yolk and then deconstructed, the bottle did the job of a vacuum cleaner and suctioned just the yolk, easy and simple.

With an electric mixer at a medium-high speed, the recipe said that in 10 minutes it should be at a point where when turning the bowl the cream should not fall off. When I arrived at the 8th minute of beating and seeing that the cream did not thicken, I arrived the second help of my daughter, I take the mixer and continued beating... Beater in hand told me: ... Don't worry daddy, sometimes this takes more than 10 minutes as the recipe says.... After an additional 10 minutes at 10 o' clock in the recipe and adding the red dye and vanilla essence, we achieved our goal, a thick cream that didn't fall apart when turning the bowl. We got enough whipped cream to decorate the whole cake.

It's amazing when we get a satisfying result as this influences our mood, to see that super spongy cake, a beautiful color and very tasty to taste I change the aptitude and I showed myself that if I am able to do new things and face new challenges. The excellent results are achieved with practice, almost never get a good result on the first attempt.

From one I tell you that I'm already gathering the ingredients for the next cake, which will be for sale... A convention is coming up at the end of the month and I'm planning to sell my cakes in pieces.

Then I will tell you how that experience went.