Why cakes rise
A cake rises because bubbles of gas grow inside the MIXTURE as it heats, and the batter sets around them. Some of the air goes in when you beat BUTTER and sugar together, which is called creaming, or WHISK eggs until they are thick and pale. The rest comes from raising agents. Bicarbonate of soda gives off carbon dioxide when it meets an acid, such as buttermilk, yoghurt or lemon juice. Baking powder is bicarbonate of soda with a dry acid already mixed in, so it only needs water and heat to start fizzing. Our acids and bases page covers the chemistry.
Bread uses YEAST instead, a living fungus that feeds on sugar and gives off gas, and a bread dough needs time to KNEAD and rise. A SPONGE cake gets almost all its lift from whisked eggs.
Measuring by cup or by weight
American bakers MEASURE with cups, so a RECIPE might ask for two cups of FLOUR. Most European bakers weigh everything on scales instead. Weighing is more reliable, because a cup of flour can hold very different amounts depending on how tightly it is packed, and even cups differ: an American cup holds about 240 millilitres, while the metric cup used in Australia holds 250. British recipes for gas ovens use gas marks, from gas mark 1, which is cool, up to 9, which is very hot.
The Victoria sponge, two layers of sponge with jam and cream in between, is named after Queen Victoria, who is said to have enjoyed a slice with her afternoon tea. It became a test of any baker's skill, and still turns up in every village show.
A cookie that was meant to be
In 1938 Ruth Wakefield, who ran the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts with her husband, chopped a bar of chocolate into her biscuit dough. A popular story says she ran out of baker's chocolate and hoped the pieces would melt; in fact she was an experienced cook who knew perfectly well that they would not. The chocolate chip COOKIE was born, and she later sold the right to print her recipe on chocolate packets.
The flavour a twelve-year-old saved
VANILLA comes from the pod of a climbing orchid from Mexico. When people tried to grow it elsewhere, the plants flowered but made no pods, because the bees that pollinated them in Mexico were missing. In 1841, on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy called Edmond Albius worked out how to pollinate each flower by hand with a thin stick. Growers everywhere still use his method, and every flower has to be done on the one day it opens. No wonder vanilla is one of the most expensive flavourings in the world.
Most baking is gentler. Mixing BATTER with a SPATULA, cutting shapes with a ROLLING PIN, wearing an APRON, spreading ICING or American FROSTING, and scattering SPRINKLES, which the Dutch pour over buttered bread for breakfast, turn one CUPCAKE into a batch. A good cake leaves a few CRUMBS on the plate; a COCOA sponge leaves chocolate ones, straight from the OVEN.