The sunny side up!

            After a disastrous baking day in the kitchen a few days ago, trying to get a citrus cake done (wasted some yummy fresh orange juice), I was quite let down that I had not turned out as good at baking as I had thought I would. I had wanted to indulge in some sinful citrus calories for the hot summer for quite sometime, so I baked a cake with all purpose flour/Maida moving away from my healthier version of wheat cake just so that I could get a spongier cake. Alas I was hugely disappointed. Though it looked pretty for the camera, it didn't go down so well with the tasting buds. It had a rubbery feel, was dense and definitely didn't taste like cake. Though I slept through the night, this mess up was biting my head off the next day to find out what had actually gone wrong with the recipe (remember, one needs to be precise to bake a perfect cake). So I went for it again but this time with smaller batches for citrus cupcakes instead of a cake. It was a good start with the batter tasting  just fine, I went ahead without any change in the recipe and put it to bake. I expected a super fluffy, honeycomb structured cupcake but out came an extremely white set of cupcakes with glazed brown surface. I have seen my mom and aunts bake cake with only Maida and I swear I have never seen a whiter cake as this one. though it tasted good, it still retained that rubbery feel to it. Now this drove me up the wall as the same recipe previously with the whole wheat flour had turned out perfectly well and much fluffier. There I went again racking my brains for where I could have possibly gone wrong. For some strange reason I turned over the All purpose flour's packet to check the date of manufacture, thankfully I hadn't used expired flour (now that would have become an actual disaster) but it was pretty old flour (Maida is rarely used in my kitchens) and old flours result in bad cakes. I heaved a sigh of relief and I am pinning my hopes on the old flour for my cake failure and not myself.
So I am yet again going to try the citrus recipe with wheat flour to assure myself that I was not the wrong one but the old flour indeed. Failure does strange things, well sometimes it just gets the better out of you and I have definitely learnt to take failures in a positive stride. :)