a preparation. If your goal is to master the whole spectrum of desserts, you will need to add a

dessert course to every meal of the day to allow for practicing. In a pastry kitchen there is a lot to

learn, but getting there is full of fun and it is very rewarding. If you eat the result in moderation,

even your waistline will not suffer.

Dessert Ingredients

Dairy

Dairy products are essential ingredients in many dessert items. They are often in the form of

butter, cream and milk, providing fat, flavor and moisture. Less commonly the dairy is sour cream

or yogurt. I discuss dairy products in the chapter Unscrambling Dairy and Eggs in great detail.

Please refer to that for more information.

Flour

What flour you choose has bearing on the final result of your dessert preparations, less os for

some preparations than for others. Generally two types of flour are common in pastry kitchens, all-

purpose with average starch and protein contents and cake flour with high starch, low protein

contents. The term soft flour also refers to high-starch flour, but that may not be the same as cake

flour. Cake flour explicitly implies the highest starch and lowest protein contents plus extra fine

milling to produce tender, crumbly cakes with lightest texture. Bread flour with its low starch and

high protein is only useful in a few types of desserts. Even sweet yeast preparations don't benefit

from using bread flour.

TASTINGS Protein and starch in flour

Hard wheat flour that is ideal for bread making has 12 percent protein, while a

soft cake flour contains 7.5 percent. All-purpose flour is a blend with around 10.5

percent protein. As the amount of protein goes down, the starch content goes up,

since protein and starch are the two main ingredients of flour.

If you don't have cake flour on hand when a recipe calls for it, you can increase the starch

content of all-purpose flour by adding 3 tablespoons cornstarch to a measuring cup then fill the cup

with flour and blend.

In some regions of the U.S. (particularly in the South and Southeast) you can also buy pastry

flour. This is also a high-starch flour but not as high as cake flour and it is excellent for baking

powder breads.

Self-rising flour is simply all-purpose flour premixed with baking powder and salt, ready for

baking. Avoid it. Mix your own instead both for economy and to avert the risk of stale baking

powder if the self-rising flour had been stored too long. If a recipe calls for self-rising flour, add 1

teaspoon baking powder and 1/8th teaspoon salt to every cup of all-purpose flour. Mix well and you

have fresh self-rising flour.

Sugar

Sugar is sugar.. There is not much you can vary with sugar as an ingredient. Yet there is

some difference. Every sugar particle is a single crystal and should you look at sugar under a

microscope, these crystals are sharp, angular. The sharp corners help to trap air bubbles and add

volume to batters during their rise in the oven. Should you substitute the very fine icing sugar, the

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