Today, we started our "quick bread" labs. We made mini marble pound cakes, lemon pound cake (three pans!) and an apple streusel coffee cake. We started by talking about the different techniques to use, but mostly about creaming. So far, I have learned that the most important part of baking (these sorts of things) is the CREAMING! You must cream the ingredients (usually a fat with sugar, or even flour and fat) for just the right amount of time to achieve the proper lift. It's all very scientific- and easy to mess up! So, I started with the marble pound cake. They turned out very well, actually! The only thing is that I used a convection oven, which cooks the cake in a circular motion and therefore creates a strange bubble on the tops. But that's fine! It doesn't change the deliciousness! Next, I made the lemon pound cakes. Did you know that pound cakes actually contain a pound of each ingredient?! My waistline is suffering! I took my loaves out of the oven, and they looked perfect! I was so pleased. Little did I know that the insides were not cooked completely (although the tops looked done) and so the tops fell. They're still fine, it's just not as round on the top. Again, they still taste good at least! Now, about the coffee cake... The recipe was fairly complicated. You had to peel, dice and season apples. Then roast those apples while mixing the batter to the perfect consistency and finally layer all the ingredients. Everything was working just fine... except when they went in the oven. It turns out, we were supposed to use Ida Red apples because they contain less moisture, but we were delivered the very wet McIntosh apples instead. So, all this affected our cakes. They never cooked! Everyone's, including mine, weren't working out! So, our instructor (who looked fairly disappointed as well) said that it is his fault and that we will try again tomorrow. So, I don't have a coffee cake to show off quite yet, but I will hopefully tomorrow!

Here are my first attempts at quick breads!