temperature dial you have selected. Most ovens are simple to adjust. Remove the oven temperature

control knob and look for a tiny screw inside the shaft that controls the level of heat. Adjust with a

very light touch. Ovens with electronic controls are particularly easy—just follow your manual's

instructions.

Baking at high altitude

At higher altitude we need to change a few things when we bake with leavening (yeast or

baking powder). As you travel to higher elevation, the atmospheric pressure becomes lower

(remember Physics 101?), and a leavened batter or dough requires less effort to puff up. So if you

use the same amount of leavening agent in your sponge cake in Albuquerque, New Mexico than in

Brantford, Ontario, your cake in Albuquerque becomes enormous, misshapen and perhaps falls over

because it over-rises. There is not enough pressure in the atmosphere to keep it down to its proper

height.

So what do you do? Use less leavening when you bake at an elevation of over 3000 feet

(900 m) and raise baking temperature. If you live at higher altitude, consult a local cookbook for

detail. A good cookbook gives you a number of points you want to observe so your cakes,

breads, muffins and soufflés come out from the oven as if you were in Brantford, Ontario.

Cakes and Tortes

Cakes are favorites in all western cuisines, while tortes are just as popular in pastry kitchens

with French culinary influence. The difference is small but significant—tortes are cakes with little

or no flour. They acquire their bodies from ground nuts and plenty more eggs. Some tortes may

have a small amount of flour to thicken the batter, some have dry bread crumbs. Tortes use 2 to 4

times the number of eggs that most cake recipes call for. Both cakes and tortes receive high esteem

on dining tables, and when it comes to a celebration or a festive occasion, one or the other is

unquestionably the choice as the last course in our dining rooms. The selection may be as simple as

a home-baked cake from a mix, or a basic inscribed supermarket cake in technicolor or elaborate,

exquisite torte from a high-end pastry shop.

The name torte has been misused by fashionable menu writers to enhance the image of a

simple cake. Torte connotes something rich, European and elegant. Now airline meal menu may

denote "torte" as one item on your crammed tray of food for the small piece of simple, unpretentious

white cake topped with a strawberry-flavored sugar syrup.

The high reputation of tortes is well-deserved. Not because cakes cannot be equally

sumptuous and elaborate and just as difficult to produce. Yet, a humble home baker can bake a

simple, easy, almost foolproof cake, but any true torte takes meticulous care, some knowledge and

baking experience before you can serve it with pride. And they are anything but foolproof. Tortes

don't have a flour matrix to give them strength, and are particularly sensitive to collapse if you dare

to disturb them before fully set in the oven. They rely entirely on solidified egg white foam structure

for support, which is considerably weaker than a combination of flour and egg white. There is no

starch that gelatinizes on heat to give the body extra strength.

Perfect cakes and tortes are light and tender, with moist body, just the opposite of good yeast

bread where the goal is a chewy and firm texture with strength provided by the gluten structure. The

trick to a light cake is not allowing the gluten to develop, the arch enemy of all sweet baked

products. Since tortes have no flour, gluten problems don't exist. Cakes do have flour but you can do

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