User talk:Goodgerster

Cookbook:Sponge_Cake and Cookbook:Impossible Sponge_Cake
The recipe for sponge cake is indeed incorrectly weighted.

I understand that the recipe is intended to be scalable. Besides being complicated and probably not needed, the procedure doesn't work.

First of all, the Cookbook:Baking Soda or Cookbook:Baking Powder (Very different! Which one?) is not scaled. If scaling is so important, this is a problem.


 * On second thought, it doesn't matter. This ingredient is unused. Perhaps the original recipe used normal flour?

The second is the matter of the eggs. If the eggs have lost weight and you do not add water to restore them, you will be using eggs that are thicker than normal. Your instructions handle eggs that have lost content via a leak, not via evaporation.

You say that the recipe is 140+ years old. This might be older than the stanardization of egg weights. The USDA Large egg is about the same size as an EU size M egg. I presume this is what you mean. Since these are the default sizes AFAIK, it would have been better to leave the size unspecified. Relying on standard weights will let you be accurate to plus-or-minus 6% or so, which is good enough for every recipe I've ever used.

Regarding kitchen scales, you are clearly unaware of world-wide cooking issues. I have never heard of a US household having such an item. The normal US household has only a crude bathroom scale for measuring human weight. I would not be able to purchase a kitchen scale at any normal place (supermarket) for buying kitchen items. I'd have to drive a long way to a specialty cooking store. I'd probably have to pay $30. Nobody normal would ever do that. Most people in the US are unfamiliar with weighing anything not measured in whole pounds, which would make for a truly huge cake.

Fortunately, the recipe can be fixed based on normal density of the various ingredients.