Over the course of the following 24 lessons, you will learn foundational cooking techniques that will open up a broader world of food and cooking for your enjoyment. The goal of this comprehensive program is to help you become a better cook—one that is more confident, more aware, and more likely to draw satisfaction from the craft of preparing food. This program is based on three broad themes. The first is understanding that ingredients have to be of good quality and that you can only expect those ingredients to do certain things. The second broad theme is learning some foundational cooking techniques. Finally, it is important that you understand the interaction of taste and flavor, which is the focus of this lesson.

For many people, the excitement in baking lies in making different types of cakes, and whether it’s a humble pound cake or the most show-stopping wedding cake, all cakes are made with just a few basic mixing methods. In the last lesson, we saw the creaming method of mixing, in which air is incorporated into butter; once that air is exposed to heat, it expands, causing the cake to rise. In this lesson, we’ll look at two additional methods of mixing—the combination method and the foaming method—and we’ll apply these in making a devil’s food, a chiffon, and an angel food cake.