Orange Puff Cake adapted from Famous Baker Maida Heatter
Before Hawaii: a story and recipe from The Baking Wizard! Greg updates Orange Puff Cake from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts
Failure in a Maida Heatter recipe? Highly unusual. So I wrote Maida, telling her my woes, and she wrote back very sympathetically but said she couldn’t help me at all because she has never lived at high altitude. Missoula, Montana, where I live, is 3,400 ft above sea level.
Altering a Recipe like Harry Potter’s Half-Blood Prince.
In the sixth Harry Potter book, the boy wizard uses a notebook in his potions class inscribed as being the property of someone called the half-blood prince. The formula instructions have been altered with hand-written notes, and Harry decides to follow them instead of the printed word. Harry succeeds and his classmates fail. What are we to make of this? I’d say the half-blood prince, through systematic trial and error, enabled Harry to achieve his goals.
Maida Heatter is my baking guru. In September, 2016, she turned 100 years old! Happy Birthday, Maida. Her first book, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts, published in 1974 by Knopf, so captivated me that I felt compelled to make every recipe. All 267 of them. It took me eighteen months, but by the end of it I had learned so much about baking and dessert making that I’ve carried those lessons with me ever since. If blogging had existed then, I’d have happily reported my experiences as I baked and ate my way through the book.
Greg Patent’s version of Heatter’s Orange Puff Cake
Despite Maida’s meticulously developed formulas, I tweaked many recipes that worked perfectly well but didn’t necessarily suit my tastes, and in some cases I had better results when I changed oven temperatures slightly. Like the half-blood prince, I made notes in the margins of the book. But even after following Maida’s directions carefully, I had one real failure: Mildred Knopf’s Orange Puff Cake. Failure in a Maida Heatter recipe? Highly unusual. So I wrote Maida, telling her my woes, and she wrote back very sympathetically but said she couldn't help me at all because she has never lived at high altitude. Missoula, Montana, where I live, is 3,400 feet above sea level. And this is where high altitude baking problems usually first arise.
Mildred Knopf’s Orange Puff Cake gave me such troubles it took me about 4 years of on and off testing before I got it to work. Here are my notes scribbled onto a page of the printed recipe.
Looking back all those decades now, I liken myself to the half-blood prince in spirit, tweaking the recipes to match my style and my taste. And I imagine most bakers, women included of course, are also like him, because fiddling and adjusting and just plain mucking around are in our blood in our quest for perfection. So never feel that you must always follow a recipe religiously—that’s only needed the first time. After that, feel free to improvise, and don’t feel bad about writing your changes right into a cookbook!