Already a student? Dive back in here:
Already a student? Dive back in here:
Cake Science
Enrollment is currently CLOSED for this course as we’re updating and improving its contents. Sign up for our waitlist to be updated when it launches!
Making a cake isn’t too complicated is it? Whereas that’s probably true for the simpler cake varieties, making a good cake can actually be quite complicated since cakes can be highly delicate structures. Get your ratios off or skip a crucial step and a cake might not work anymore.
As we ‘preach’ everywhere on FoodCrumbles.com cooking and baking becomes a lot easier if you know why you’re taking certain steps. If you understand the important role that ingredients play. That also goes up for baking cakes!
Making different types of cakes can feel overwhelming since there are so many types out there. But at their core, every cake has a very similar basis. This course explores this scientific basis to help you understand how and why your cakes work (or don’t) to then make even better cakes!
This knowledge isn’t just helpful when baking cakes by the way. You can learn a lot about our general scientific approach and do very similar analyses on all sorts of foods!
We’ve written about cake on many occasions. But we wanted to bring it all together in a structured form, making it simple and easy to follow. Through a mix of labs, recipes – and a good chunk of theory – you’ll learn about the science of cake. By the end of the course, you’ll understand the role of ingredients in cake, how and when you can replace ingredients and as a result you will be able to make several different recipes.
This course is definitely for you if:
- You’ve made cakes before but want to improve your skills or create your own recipes with confidence.
- You want to be able to solve common cake making mistakes with quick troubleshooting.
- You don’t have extensive scientific knowledge, but you’re curious about the science behind a cake.
- You work in a bakery and want more confidence when speaking with technical experts.
- You’re a professionaly trained baker but have never been taught the ‘why’.
- You just love cake!
This course is probably not for you if:
- You’re just looking for recipes. In this case, why not browse through our cake section and choose a recipe you’d like to try.
- You’ve read tons of books about cake science already. This course will probably be too basic for you. (If you’d like to audit the course and want to give us feedback, let us know and we’ll happily give you access in exchange for improvement suggestions!)
Prerequisites
For this course, we do assume a basic level of understanding of scientific terminology. If you have no clue what fats, proteins, carbohydrates, molecules, atoms, and phase transitions are, we would recommend you start out with our Food Chemistry Basics course. This will prepare you for this course!
This cake course contains some ‘lab work’. During these practical sessions, the theory you are taught in the course will be brought to life. To complete these labs, you will need:
- Basic kitchen gear: such as bowls, spatula, whisk, stand mixer or electric mixer, and of course an oven.
- Basic pantry ingredients : such as sugar, flour, butter, eggs, baking powder/soda and a few alternative ingredients
Every lab exercise will clearly state what you’ll need.
The course can be completed without doing this lab work, but it would be beneficial to your understanding of the process!
*Please note: this course is still being beta tested – we want you to try it out and give us feedback! By signing up, you give us permission to send you an e-mail requesting feedback on the course.