Cakes and biscuits; I know what I mean!

Rules. We all need rules to exist in our complicated lives. Speed limits are a good example. Very important, they keep us safe on the roads. But we all have our own version of rules: in a 70 mph limit, it’s okay for me to drive at 74 mph, but it’s totally unacceptable for someone to overtake me at 80 mph, that’s just irresponsible and unsafe! Rules are great – for other people.

And so it is for baking, we have rules. Rules that define what products are. Recipe balance rules for cakes that give an indication of what ingredients work and what don’t. The problem with rules is that they try to be definitive but are rarely written accurately enough to satisfy every eventuality, so inevitably they will require interpretation. As users of rules, we start to look for ways of skirting round them or interpreting them in very lax ways. In effect, rules have always been designed to be broken!

Let’s consider bakery product names. The baking industry is very traditional. We have traditional names for products and we are comfortable with them. If we see a product, then we instinctively know what it is. We use unwritten rules we have learnt over time to tell us whether a product is a ‘cake’ or a ‘biscuit’ or even a ‘bread’, but it can be difficult to put these definitions into words.

We can start with a simple question: what is a biscuit?

Well, in the UK at least, it’s a long shelf-life snack, made principally from flour, sugar and fat. It will be small, round or square, crisp or at least hard, dry, have a long shelf-life at ambient temperatures, and if the mood takes us, we can dunk it in our tea. If we leave the lid off the biscuit tin, they will go soft as they absorb humidity from the air, and soft biscuits are not good. In general, I am sure we would all recognise a biscuit if we saw one.

So what is a cake?

That’s reasonably easy as well. Cakes are an aerated confection made from fat, sugar, flour and eggs. They are soft, moist, have a shorter shelf-life and are much bigger than biscuits. They come in a variety of sizes, small, large and multi-tiered, but even the smallest of cakes such as muffins are bigger than biscuits. The key ingredient will be the fat which helps stabilise the aeration, giving the characteristic open structure. When you leave the lid off the cake tin, the cake goes dry and hard and hard cakes are not good. In general, I am sure we would all recognise a cake if we saw one.

But if we try to define a sponge, it’s not quite so easy

We use the term ‘sponge’ in many ways in the baking industry, so it can only be defined when you know the context it is being used in. It can be part of the traditional bread making process where a ‘sponge’ is a fermented dough; it can be the description of a product texture, but to keep to our theme, traditionally a sponge is a type of cake made of sugar, flour and egg, but no fat. The eggs are an important ingredient as it is the egg proteins that stabilise the aeration and give structure. True sponges tend to be a little drier eating than a cake due to the lack of fat, which makes them ideally suited for use with cream and fruit and perfect for use in trifles! A baker may well have a rule describing a sponge but it does not have to be the same rule as the consumer.

Rule 1 – Bakers’ rules are not written down, and different groups have different rules for the same products

These definitions may not be precise ‘rules’, but they are reasonable descriptions of what we would expect a product to be. However, we have already said that rules are designed to be broken and many products break the rules.

For example, what is a Victoria sponge? Quite clearly looking at a normal recipe, it contains flour, fat, sugar and eggs. The fact that it contains fat as a major ingredient makes it a ‘Cake’ and not a ‘Sponge’. Many people get ‘Sponge’ and ‘Cake’ mixed up so does it really matter what we call them? To make things even more complicated, with the use of emulsifiers and other functional ingredients, we can now make low fat cakes or high fat sponges. The fact that fat content to a baker is the main difference between a cake and a sponge is no longer valid, the two products are effectively the same. This rule is probably out of date.

Rule 2 – Rules are not fixed. We can change rules to suit the current situation

So if our rules don’t work for sponges, do they work for other products?

Let’s consider a Jaffa Cake. To look at it, quite clearly the perception is that it is a biscuit, but is it? Look at the product definitions above and you can see that it fits much more into the cake/sponge category. It is an open structure, the main ingredients are flour, eggs and sugar; it is fairly soft when fresh and goes harder over time. Can it be that a Jaffa Cake is actually a cake? The answer is unequivocal, it is a cake, the law says so.

As we have rules for bakery products so, in the UK, we have rules for VAT, and like all rules, they try to be very clear. You will pay VAT on a chocolate coated biscuit and NOT on a chocolate coated cake. Chocolate coated biscuits are defined as luxury items so attract VAT, whereas chocolate coated cakes are an essential(!) item, therefore VAT free. However, there are always going to be products that sit on the edge of our rules, and the Jaffa Cake is such a product. The manufacturers want it to be a cake (they don’t want their customers to pay VAT) and HM Customs and Excise want the income from them being biscuits. The definition of biscuits and cakes was eventually tested in court, when HM Customs & Excise questioned whether a Jaffa Cake was really a cake. They took the view that we all know what a cake looks like, and a Jaffa Cake looks like a biscuit.

It was proved without question that a Jaffa Cake is a real cake. It uses cake ingredients, it is soft when it is first made and as it ages, it will go firmer/harder just like a cake. Moreover, to prove the point, McVitie’s made a large version of the Jaffa Cake and it looked just like a cake.

Rule 3 – Perception of a product can be misleading

The Jaffa Cake ruling was important for the purposes of VAT but it does little for our understanding of baking technology. As Bakery Technologists, we are always looking for new types of products, and any product that sits between categories is going to be interesting.

There are other well known products that cross over from one group to another, but their definitions have not been tested in court because they have never been challenged; take, for example, soft American style cookies. We would all accept that they are a type of biscuit, but they break all the biscuit rules. They are big (as big as muffins), they have a short shelf-life, they are soft when fresh, but go hard as they get older. Does that make them a cake?

Are Danish Pastries really pastry, or are they a fermented cake? The fact is that they are fermented; maybe they could be described as a bread!

Is Tea Bread really a bread? Isn’t it really a cake?

The problem is that as soon as we start making rules, there will always be exceptions, and when we get exceptions we either change the product or change the rules but with no added benefit.

Rules are important, but only as a guide; in product development, they inhibit creativity. Whereas we may need some product definitions to suit tax law, in reality as Bakery Technologists, we cannot maintain the myth that there is a distinction between bread, cake and biscuits. They all belong to what we should recognise as Bakery Technology.

The relationship between different products is shown in Figure 1 where the main ingredients and the products they make are shown together.

Figure 1

While it is not meant to be totally accurate, what is interesting about it is the space between the boxes. Spaces where new products can be fitted in, and they may not comfortably fit into any particular category.

In reality, all ingredients have a function, and that function is very similar in all products. Flour provides structure. Sugar helps aerate, stabilises the viscosity, influences the setting temperature, helps browning and binds water. Fat helps with aeration and softness, and improves perceived crumb freshness.

The chart is based on ‘Baker’s percentage’ in which flour in a recipe is taken as 100 per cent and all the ingredients are added as a percentage of the flour weight. Therefore, 50 per cent fat is 50 per cent of the flour weight.

We can see quite clearly that all products are related to each other. Bread, cream crackers and semi-sweet biscuits are very closely related. In these products, flour is a critical ingredient and gluten development is responsible for many of the product characteristics. The products are made from doughs that can be moulded or sheeted.

Short pastry and shortbread/biscuits are virtually overlapping. Flour is of less importance in these products, the eating qualities are much shorter as the name implies and influenced by the fats and sugars. These products are still doughs, but sheeting becomes more difficult and moulding and blocking are more relevant.

However, probably one of the surprises is the close proximity of cookies and cakes. As we said earlier, soft cookies could easily be described as cakes and here we see the main ingredients are very similar.

So do product names really matter and are they still relevant?

In reality, does the consumer really care what we call products so long as they know what to do with it and enjoy the experience of eating it? Does the industry really need categories to distinguish one product from another?

We can all recognise bread, or a biscuit or a cake, but there will always be exceptions, and the more the consumer and the industry search for ‘innovative’ products so any distinction between them becomes even more blurred. What is important is that we understand the functionality of raw materials so we can make what we like. Does it really matter what we call them?

Rule 4 – in baking technology, understand ingredient functionality, then learn to break the rules.