It’s a rainy day outside, cold and cloudy. You cannot figure out something to do to pass the time. You realize that you have a cake mix in your pantry. You then decide to make that cake. You have just moved to a new town and have not baked a cake at the high altitude of you new home. After readying the box you see that there are special directions to making the cake at a high altitude. Why does baking a cake at high altitudes change the recipe of a cake?
Photo By Mathew Bland
It’s all about the physics of the ingredients in the cake that changes the recipe to make the cake and bake it at high altitudes. In class we learned that water boils at a lower temperature in higher altitudes. The temperature that water boils at affects baking a cake. At a high altitudes the lower the air pressure is; which is one of the factors of why the water boils at a low temperature. So some recipes call for adding more water. The reason to add more water is because of the way the water boils at a low temperature it will make evaporate or turn into strsm.
Some of you might be wondering how this works because on the box cakes it asks you to add more flour. Well let me explain. There is also something in cake batter that is called leavening. A leavening agent is such things as baking soda or baking powder. Leavening is involved with the air and is made to help the cake rise. Baking soda starts to work when it is added to the mix and then moistened. Once moistened it begins to release carbon dioxide which makes gas bubbles in the cake that makes the cake rise. And since there is less air at higher altitudes the leavening is affected by the water and air. So adding water helps during the baking process because when you raise the temperature to baking temperature the more water will evaporate during the process of baking the cake and helps the leavening work.
Photo By EverJean
When looking at a box cake it is a bit different than making the cake by hand. When you are mixing in all the ingredients yourself you can add more water. But if you buy a box of cake mix at the store you could add more water but it wouldn’t fix the problem because of the ingredients ratio in the mix. So on the box of cake mix it tells you to add extra flour. The extra flour that is added is also to do with the leavening. The lower the air pressure at high altitudes will make the cake raise way too fast. Then the cake falls in in the middle. By adding extra flour it helps level out the ratio of flour and leavening. In making a cake from scratch you could take out some of the leavening but in a box mix this is not possible so that is why you add extra flour.
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&ndash This book does a great job of covering the science behind cooking. The book gave me information about how the leavening responds to the different components in the cake. I think this is a very reliable source. The book was helpful but I found more helpful information elsewhere. I would use this book in my kitchen to just understand how science works while cooking.
&ndash On docstoc.com there are articles. The article I used was Tips for cooking at high altitudes. The article gave me information on how water boils at a lower temperature, what high altitudes consists of, and what different ways to help bake at high altitudes. I think that this source is reliable. The source was useful on giving basic information.
&ndash This web encyclopedia gave information on what leavening was and how it worked. This source is very reliable. The encyclopedia helped me understand what was going on with the leavening and water when baking a cake. I found this source to be very useful.
&ndash This web page was on how different leavenings work and the different kinds of leavening. This information corresponded with some of my other sources. The information was mostly the same but this web page had some added information that was useful. If this source had not have the same information as my reliable sources I wouldn’t consider it reliable.
I allow attribution of this work. Alows others to remix or tweak and build upon work, as long as credit is given to Tonya Lacy.