Monitoring cake baking by studying different ingredient interactions: From a model system to a real system

Abstract

Cake batter is a complex matrix essentially composed of lipids, egg, sugar and flour. The baking process plays an important role in the structural, textural and physical properties of cakes, as in all bakery products. Knowledge of the interactions between the ingredients and the induced phenomena, such as starch gelatinization and complexation, protein denaturation and competition for water at the different stages of batter baking, can be used as the key quality control of the end-product “cake”. The aim of this work was to investigate in depth the interactions between the different constituents of the batter by differential scanning analysis and heating cell X-ray diffraction on model and real batter systems. The results show that ‘three ingredients’ model systems can explain the different phenomena occurring during the baking of cake batter (real system). In the presence of sugar and fat, in a limited water system, starch gelatinization takes place in two steps, the largest part being combined with protein denaturation at high temperature.