“If you want to bake a good cake, you have to have seven things” – who doesn’t know the old children’s song whose final line “Safran makes the cake gel” has always raised questions. Ottobrunn master baker Werner Fiegert knows that there are two different interpretations of the last of the seven ingredients that were mixed together in 1840 to make “Backe, backekuchen”, an evergreen of bakery poetry. One where “gel” means nothing but yellow, another which assumes it means “supple” or “smooth”.
It tends to be “yellow,” says the baker, because even a small pinch of the spice is enough to color a cake and therefore has no effect on the texture of the dough. If you want to afford the expensive saffron, which was once worth its weight in gold, you should also pay attention to the quality of the other six ingredients for a tasty sponge cake. The man from Ottobrunn runs a total of eleven branches in the district of Munich with his wife. Angelika Fiegert is a master confectioner; the two met during their training.
Werner Fiegert recommends a three-pot mixture when stirring the dough, “even if four bowls have to be cleaned afterwards”. This means that butter and sugar are whipped up, followed by the egg yolks (in a water bath) and the egg whites, which are beaten with salt to an airy consistency. Salt is not only important for the taste because it complements sugar well, it also makes the protein snow more stable, explains the master baker.
The three whipped masses are now combined into one and “carefully” fold in milk and flour alternately. According to Werner Fiegert, it is very important that all the ingredients are at room temperature. If the ingredients are too cold, the mass will not come together and will flake out. “You can’t get any air into the dough, so it doesn’t become supple,” explains the expert and names another source of error, this time when baking: the sponge cake should be in the oven for 50 to 60 minutes at 180 degrees circulating air when it’s too gets hot, “then the cake is brown on the outside and crusty on the inside,” warns the baker. He doesn’t cover the finished cake with chocolate. “Only with powdered sugar, otherwise the fineness of the saffron is lost,” he says.
The ingredients for the recipe largely correspond to those mentioned in the song, apart from the additional baking powder: 250 grams of butter, 250 grams of sugar, six eggs, 500 grams of flour, 170 milliliters of milk, a pinch of salt and a jar of saffron, which makes the cake gel.
In the series “My number” the SZ presents people every day until Christmas, in whose life a number has a special meaning – from 1 to 24 like in an advent calendar.