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06/18/1999 Archived Entry: "One Recipe+Three Bakers=Three Different Cakes"

Last week I had the nerve to ask three master bakers, baking teachers and award-winning cookbook authors to bake the same chocolate layer cake recipe and bring it to me in my radio studio. Rose Levy Beranbaum ( The Cake Bible, The Pie and Pastry Bible), Carole Walter (Great Cakes, Great Pies and Tarts), and Nick Malgieri ( How To Bake, Chocolate: From Simple Cookies To Extravagant Showstoppers) were good sports about it. Sorry to say, the chocolate cake wasn’t wonderful.

The idea was to see if the same recipe precisely prepared by different hands would turn out the same or different. They were different, as we all expected.

I picked the recipe based on nothing more scientific than it was one I had always wanted to try, and it was for chocolate cake, which is always popular. It came
from “Rosie’s Bakery All-Butter Fresh Cream Sugar-Packed No-Holds-Barred Baking Book” by Cambridge, Mass. baker Judy Rosenberg. Unfortunately, the cake was even more of a mouthful than the lengthy title. In a Yiddish word, I’d call the cake “clutzy.” In another word, “clumsy.” Although some people (I think too many) like dense, chewy cake, I don’t, and this one doesn’t have the chocolate flavor intensity I dream about. The fudge frosting lifts the cake into a higher level, but still, Nick’s version (actually baked by his students at the Peter Kump Cooking School, where he is director of baking studies) was gummy. Carole’s cake and frosting were the lightest. Her cake was even a little higher than the others, and her frosting shinier. The cake was not the thing, however. The point was that they were all so different.

Differences in ingredients could account for some of the variations. For instance, Carole uses superfine (instant dissolving) sugar, while Rose uses golden sugar (which has a higher moisture content), and Nick uses plain granulated. Rose and Carole use bleached flour and Nick unbleached, but Nick insists that in a recipe with such a small amount of flour that shouldn’t matter. In my opinion, what mattered as much as, if not more than the different ingredients, were the different hands mixing the cake. I must say, I thought there was a big difference in quality between the two cakes baked by professional hands -- Carole's and Rose's -- and the one made by students, the cake brought in by Nick. Technique, I think, makes as much difference as ingredients. (But then, it's like the question, which has more influence on living things, genetics or environment.)

Anyway, it was fun, and it once again proved was that no matter how precisely you may follow a recipe the food is always going to turn out different in different hands.

In fact, I got the idea for the exercise because all of us had been on book promotion tours last fall and were bemoaning the fact that you often go to an event where they’ve made your recipes and the food is unrecognizable. Indeed, Marcella Hazan once told me that she will not allow her recipes to be prepared for a promotional event. Some other food must be served. I wish I had the leverage to impose that rule.

In addition, I had read about a group of food professionals in California that gathered at teacher and author Marion Cunningham’s house with the same cake. Fifteen bakers. Fifteen different cakes.