Qifeng cake has always been a hot cake on the baking list. Whether eaten alone or with cream, its soft and delicate taste is intoxicating. Although Qifeng cake seems simple, for beginners, this popular cake can easily make people "angry" or even "crazy". Qifeng cake can be said to be a hurdle that beginners must cross, and only when they master it can they be considered as real entry baking. Before learning to make cakes, I strongly recommend you to read my Basic Course of Cake, which is a must-see for beginners. From hurricane to pound cake, after reading small white cake, as long as you master the basic operation inside the cake, basically most problems can be solved.

This tutorial introduces the making of ordinary round Qifeng cake, which is generally used to decorate flowers, because eating naked is really not as delicious as hollow Qifeng cake. If you haven't made a hollow Qifeng cake, you can buy a mold and try it. The taste will definitely make you "eat a catty". There is another embarrassing problem with the round Qifeng cake. Its bearing capacity is not as good as sponge cake, so it can't be used for cake decoration with heavy cream and many fruits.

I have written a tutorial on hollow Qifeng cake before, which is super detailed and zero failure. You can have a look if you are interested. Compared with the hollow Qifeng cake, the round Qifeng cake is more prone to concave bottom, collapse and other problems, because the chimney at the bottom of the hollow mold has high heat conduction efficiency, which can make the batter in the middle evenly heated, so it is not easy to sag. So how does Yuanqifeng cake solve these problems? I'll sell it here first, which will be discussed in detail below.

Raw material analysis

The ingredients of Qifeng cake are simple. Eggs, flour, sugar, vegetable oil and milk, together with lemon juice or white vinegar, can make delicious Qifeng cake.

In the choice of eggs, we must use fresh eggs, preferably foreign eggs, because this kind of egg has a high protein content, which is very suitable for making Qifeng cake. Usually, I make an 8-inch Qifeng cake, 55-60g (with shell) for five eggs, and the protein weight should be controlled at150-170g, so that the finished product can basically be covered with mold. If you want to increase the height of the cake, increase the weight of the protein, but it is best not to exceed 170 g, which is easy to produce mushroom heads. Of course, if you just pour part of the batter into the mold, forget it.

Generally, cakes are made of low-gluten flour. If you are afraid of gluten produced by improper mixing of batter, you can use 20% corn starch instead of low-gluten flour to greatly reduce the gluten of batter. But I don't think gluten is the key factor affecting the success of Qifeng cake, because the contents of oil (including oil in egg yolk) and sugar in Qifeng cake batter are high, which will hinder the formation of gluten. As long as you don't make a fuss, it won't affect the cake expansion. The dosage of 8-inch Qifeng cake powder is between 80- 100g, which can be flexibly adjusted according to the liquid content in your raw materials. However, it is very important that starch, like protein, is the structure that supports cakes and is equivalent to bricks for building houses. Too little starch can easily lead to insufficient support and collapse.

Matcha powder, cocoa powder, fruit and vegetable powder can be used to replace part of the flour in the raw materials. (the baking percentage is between 5%- 10%), so that Qifeng cakes with different tastes can be made. If you want to add dried fruits and nuts to the batter, you should cut them into pieces before adding these materials, so that they are not easy to deposit on the bottom of the batter, resulting in uneven texture of the finished cake.

The amount of sugar is the key to making a successful Qifeng cake. During the operation, we will divide the fine sugar into two parts, one for stirring the egg yolk batter and the other for delivering the egg whites. Fine sugar accounts for about 40% of the total weight of protein, that is to say, if the total weight of protein is 150g, then we can set the weight of fine sugar as 60g. Sugar can inhibit protein from being sent away, but its water retention makes the protein sent more stable. I won't elaborate on the principle. You can refer to the famous "Cake You Don't Know".

The purpose of using liquid oil is to make the cake softer. You can use tasteless vegetable oils such as corn oil, soybean oil and salad oil, which can make the taste of the cake more refreshing. The appropriate proportion of oil baking for windy cakes is about 50%.

The function of milk in Qifeng is to provide moisture, color, flavor and a little emulsification (relative to egg yolk). In fact, Qifeng cake with milk is not a necessary option. You can change it into water, fruit juice or other drinks, as long as its liquid content is the same as the milk in the original prescription. This tutorial uses 50 grams of milk, which should be 50*0.9=45 grams when converted into liquid, that is, 45 grams of water can be used directly instead of milk, and other juices can be calculated by themselves.