So, it's late, and you have the munchies, and your Chinese friends are expecting you to put out in the culinary sense. They want something "Western" and their ideas do not involve peanut butter or bananas. You are stymied, as you haven't gone grocery shopping in a while, don't have eggs, and one of your pals is vegan to boot. You don't have an oven. You DO have a microwave, and a square or round eight inch pan, and baby, that's all you need.
This is a riff on the classic Wacky Cake, or War Cake, or Impossible Cake. It has no eggs, no dairy, and you can reduce the amount of sugar so that your Chinese friends will eat it and pronounce it very good. (Of course, if you have any Morrocan friends over, double the icing.) You just need the pan you're going to nuke it in, a spoon, some measuring cups (one cup is fine, you can eyeball the half-cup with good results) and a strainer or colander is good to get out any lumps. All the ingredients--except perhaps the cocoa--are at the xiao mai bu in the first floor of your complex. This takes about one minute to measure, one minute to stir, and four to five minutes to nuke.
Set a colander or strainer over the cake pan. You can use a cheap plastic microwaveable pan, preferably a round one but a square one will do, size about eight inches in diameter--smaller will do if you must. Dump one and one-half cups of flour into the sifter. Add three tablespoons cocoa on top, then one cup of white sugar. Use the spoon to push the ingredients through the sifter and there, the initial mixing is done. I add a pinch of salt as well.
Make three wells, or holes, to hold the next three ingredients, spooning one ingredient into each hole. In hole one, a teaspoon of baking soda. Hole two, five tablespoons of cooking oil (NOT OLIVE OIL! I use cool melted butter for this if there are no vegans around). Hole three, one tablespoon of plain white vinegar. Pour one cup of cold water over everything, plus a teaspoon of some flavoring, such s vanilla extract, or even a teaspoon of brandy. Mix quickly until there are no weird streaks of anything--but not so much your batter gets tough. Put in microwave and cook on high for four minutes. Check--there should be some moist spots on the top of the cake, but the middle should be quite solid. If I'm using a square cake pan, it needs 4 and 1/2 minutes to be just barely done, and 5 minutes to verge on too-done. When you have determined it's finished, leave it in the microwave to cool off.
Unlike normal cakes, which have quite a bit of fat in them, this cake tends to be a bit gummy when hot: it's far better served cold, and if you can let it sit overnight, it's even better. There's a deep color to the cake, which is pleasing to the eye. I'm not overly fond of this cake but it does well in an emergency. I like tender cakes with a fine crumb and my favorite cake recipe comes from the 1952 edition of the Mirro Cookbook my mother was given as a bride. That's a Thistle Cake recipe, one which I hope to recreate for the Chinese kitchen but haven't faffed with in a while.
Note on this cake recipe: my local friends think this is too sweet, and you can safely take out three tablespoons of sugar from the one-cup measurement before it affects the texture or taste overmuch. That is to say, I make this with three tablespoons of sugar less than called for above, and my foreign friends are ok with it as I load it with frosting for them, while I serve it plain to Chinese guests, with a side of whipped cream. It's a compromise and we're all happy with it. I like to mix up this cake if I have little guests over--they like the drama of watching the baking soda hit the vinegar and it's a quick and easy chemistry lesson. You don't have to mess with the three holes thing--you can just mix up all the dry ingredients, then dump in the wet, and it's fine. But cooking is about tradition and showmanship and I am happy to think of my grandmothers mixing up this cake in precisely the same way.
No comments:
Post a Comment