One tip that comes from my baking my favourite cake recipe the first time...
My mother gave me a dog-eared but precious (to us) Dr Oetker Backbuch when I was still very new to cooking and baking. I must have been around 16. Not only was it in German, but the script was the Goethe-Schrift which is the heavy elaborate "everything looks like an s, or is it an f, and is that a w or is it three of the letter i, or is it u and i, or aaaaah" lettering.
That is why I learned how to read Goethe-Schrift, by the way.
Anyway, it was late and I was very tired, and I made a mistake in mentally translating one particular ingredient. To this day, I can't fathom how on earth I made the mistake... but where it said "Speisestärke" (or should I say 𝕾𝖕𝖊𝖎𝖘𝖊𝖘𝖙𝖆𝖊𝖗𝖐𝖊 - the closest I can manage on these boards, but the original text is all squashed up together to make it insanely hard to read), I got it into my head that the recipe was calling for cottage cheese or cream cheese or quark.
The words are nothing alike. Speisestärke means cornstarch/cornflour, and cream cheese is Sanekäse. Cottage cheese is Hüttenkäse. Quark is... quark.
Anyway, I duly made the cake... with its 8 thin cake layers sandwiched chocolate buttercream, the whole coated in a fine layer of melted chocolate... and... it was utterly fantastic. The cake dough with that spoonful of cottage cheese was mouthwateringly moist and unbelievably delicious. It had something about it... I can't quite describe it, but it affected the texture and the taste with a sort of sweet edgy quality.
For years I just followed my hand-written English translation without bothering to go back to the actual German. When I finally did, and realised that I must have made an error, I decided to make it according to the actual recipe the next time... and it just... lacked that special quality.
SO... my tip is... add a dessertspoon of cream cheese/cottage cheese/quark to your cake batter. Make sure you push it through a sieve, and mix lightly. See what you think.
