On Food and Cooking

and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or
chlorine gas. The chlorine treatment turns out
to cause the starch granules to absorb water
and swell more readily in high-sugar batters,
and produce a stronger starch gel. It also
causes fats to bind more readily to the starch
granule surface, which may help disperse the
fat phase more evenly. In combination with
the new shortening and with double-acting
baking powders, cake flour allowed U.S. food
manufacturers to develop “high-ratio”
packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can
outweigh the flour by as much as 40%.The
texture of the cakes they make is distinctively
light and moist, fine and velvety.
Thanks to these qualities and to the
convenience of premeasured ingredients,
packaged cake mixes were a great success:
just 10 years after their major introduction
following World War II, they accounted for
half of all cakes baked in U.S. homes. The
very sweet, tender, moist, light cake became