There was a lot to do with our final for this class. We had a written test and also a practical where we had to actually bake something. Our practical was done with our group. So everyone's practical was to make a pound cake. The problem was that each group had to make this pound cake either gluten free, egg free or fat free. My group luckily had gluten free. We had to take what we had learned in class and substitute different ingredients to make the regular recipe gluten free. For the original recipe, it called for 9.3 oz of cake flour but that has gluten in it so we had to use other kinds of flour that wouldn't produce gluten. So on day 8 we made the original (control) recipe of pound cake and then five experiments using different kinds of flour to try and make it taste like the original. Most gluten free cakes use a mixture of flours. The most common is rice flour, potato starch and xanthan gum. We tried this and used it as one experiment. Another test we did was use the same mixture but replace the rice flour with sorghum flour. Then we used all almond flour for the third experiment. Out fourth experiment used half almond and half hazelnut flour. The last try we did was with all coconut flour. Once all of these were baked you could see how differently they turned out. We made all of the pound cakes in muffin tins so that they could bake faster and it makes it easier for each group to get a sample of your experiments. So most of our pound cakes came out with a lot of grease on the bottom. There were puddles on the bottom of the tins. It was gross. We figured out that this happened because all of the flours that we used were nut flours. Well nuts have oil in them and so when they were baked the oil came out plus the cakes already have butter added to them as well. This gave them too much moisture. This then affected the structure causing some of them to fall in the middle. Other experiments like coconut were the opposite and had way to much structure. Below is a picture of all the different experiments we did. You can see how different they turned out.
*The top is our control then going down is the almond/hazelnut mixture, the common mixture, all almond, sorghum and then coconut on the bottom*
We thought that our experiment using all almond flour turned out the best. It didn't have a good structure but it had the flavor that we were going for. So the next day, our final day, we had to take the best recipe from day 8 and try to perfect it. Basically we had to take our almond and do at least three more experiments to make it even better. So we did a almond and sorghum mixture because we liked the taste of the almond but the structure of the sorghum. Our chef brought in sweet potato so we decided to just try all of that in one batch. And then we did another almond but we reduced the butter so it wouldn't have the puddles on the bottom. These experiments turned out really well. We had to look at the texture, structure and the flavor to decide which one was the best. In the end we thought that the almond with reduced butter was the best. It had the right flavor and had a pretty good structure like our control. It was amazing seeing how different the experiments came out and then figuring out why that happened. We did very well on our final and ended up getting an A on it. It was fascinating and I will actually miss this class.
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