Genoise, revisited
October 15th, 2006 | by Loretta |Ian, I ‘m scared.
Why? Of what?
What is my genoise won’t rise again?
Well what went wrong last time?
I enumerated the possibilities and told all to Ian. This was followed by a new plan of attack. The bain marie.
What resulted? Super volumized eggs when they were beaten. Really, a few more minutes and I wonder if the mixing bowl would have overflowed with stream of foamy eggs.
I was thrilled. And overly excited. Perhaps, I am just easily exciteable. But no longer was I fearful of not being able to get the eggs to triple in volume. Warm eggs make it easier to incorporate air into the structure, and fortunately, the bain marie helps with just that.
In my excitement, I sifted the flour into the foam and followed through with folding in the butter batter as well. Then, into the oven it went, not wasting a minute, in fear that the structure I finally made would soon fade away.
And then, at the very end, before popping the bowl into the sink for soaking, I tasted the batter.
Why is it salty?
And there it was. Sitting next to the rice cooker on the kitchen counter: pre-measured sugar.
Presto. Light and fluffy fomr my square baking pan.
The texture was even and crumbly. But I think it was rather dry. This is partly because sugar wasn’t added. And also, because genoise is a relatively dry cake to begin with since it doesn’t have much lipid in it.
The good thing about genoise being dry is that it’ll be good for soaking simple syrups and alcohol some day.
And if you’re wondering what you get when you forget the sugar? It’s pretty much…an eggy bread.