Q&A

The last post raised a few questions (on the greek side of the blog) so I will try my best to answer them (even though I can see from your comments that you're all taking care of it yourselves!)

Xanthi, I think it highly unlikely that you will find the Dairy Book of Home Cookery in any bookshop either in Athens or in the UK. The book was never distributed through book shops to my knowledge but was ordered and delivered by the local milkman (does anyone really remember the milkman?) I am not sure if there are 'Milk men' anymore. Every one seems to buy their milk from the grocery store nowadays. According to wikipedia the Milk Marketing Board was dissolved in 2002.

I was fairly surprised to find the book when I did a google search the other day. I thought that perhaps I might find a second hand one on Ebay. It seems that there must be a few still available at various online bookshops. If your children are staying in the Uk for a while they could certainly order it through one of the amazon sellers that I linked to in the last post and have it delivered to wherever they are staying.

Angeliki asked about getting cupcakes to be level on the top and not to dome.

First of all I'll point out that I always use my fan assisted oven. It makes a difference for baking cakes. My oven has two dials. One for the temperature and the other which has the different settings. With mine you can use the fan alone, the fan and the grill together. Obviously we don't want the grill on :P The fan makes the oven the same temperature all over so that it doesn't matter which level of the oven you put your cakes in (this enabled me to make three trays of cakes at a time for the wedding). Most oven manufacturers suggest lowering the temperature between 10 and 20 degrees when using the fan setting.


This is what I would do if my cakes were turning out domed:

First, I would check the oven temperature and maybe lower it by about 10 degrees. They could be rising too quickly because of the high temperature. So, I would try cooking at a slightly lower temperature for a few minutes longer. That should do the trick.


If that didn't work, I would try a different variety of SR flour. Each brand probably has different quantities of raising agent.

Lastly, I would check the size of eggs that I am using, maybe switch to the next size down or use one less.

If that failed, too, I would get a new recipe :)

Mass produced cakes are made using all sorts of pre-prepared ingredients and the amount of cake dropped into each case is controlled by a machine too! I am not a fan as you can imagine. I think the charm of home-made, baked from scratch is that they are not all exactly the same!

I am sure that the effort you made for your daughters cupcakes made them so much more special! I would have done exactly the same if my cakes had turned out domed. Adjusting the frosting to cover it is the genius solution and who can tell?? Another thing you can do is to slice off the dome and discard the domes or even better, make them into butterfly cakes.