When you're making cake, it never pays to be in too big a hurry -
When ten years old, I asked Mom if I could bake a cake. She had a new cookbook with a recipe in it I was eager to try. She turned me loose in the kitchen and excitedly, I scanned the ingredients: six eggs, a cup of flour, a cup of sugar and vanilla. Seemed easy enough. I whipped it all together and slipped it in the oven, drooling over the prospects of a warm cake.
When I pulled the cake out of the oven an hour later it looked and tasted like rubber. I poured over the recipe again. Nope. The ingredients and measurements were correct. What I hadn't done was read what needed to be done with the eggs. The whites should have been beat until they formed stiff peaks. Then all the ingredients folded gently into them. What a difference such a minor detail made in the success of the cake.
