Can one bake a cake with a cooked egg instead of a raw one?
This recent question about a person who wanted to bake a cake but only had a cooked egg left suggested me an even stupider one: is it possible to bake a cake with a cooked egg instead of a raw one? After all, the egg is going to end up cooked inside the cake anyway.
I imagine that it's going to be tricky to mix it with the dough, but with a hand mixer and a sufficient amount of violence everything is possible.
Or are the chemical processes of boiling an egg and cooking it inside the dough fundamentally different?
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I would say no. The function of the egg in the cake is to go in raw, mix with the other stuff, and once the raw egg has penetrated and coated the other ingredients thoroughly, bind it all together with that bouncy, sticky solidified eggy property which comes into existence as the egg cooks.
Cooking the egg first all by itself, then adding to a cake would be like drying some crazy glue, then grinding up that hardened crust and putting the resulting powder between two things you want to stick together. The gluing action is all over when the glue has dried.
It is possible, but only if you do not want it to act as glue.
are the chemical processes of boiling an egg and cooking it inside the dough fundamentally different?
As mentioned in earlier answers - no, but the point is that you need these processes during baking.
One notable exception is shortcrust pastry
You can use boiled egg to bake it. It is meant to be crusty, fragile. That's why you mix flour with fat first - to prevent gluing. When you use a boiled egg yolk instead of raw one, you have one less factor for gluing. It's easy to make pastry too delicate that way, but it is doable. I did it with success.
The cooked egg will work as a filler/texturing/flavoring ingredient, it will not have the baking (leavening, binding..) properties of the raw egg, so a recipe that is really dependent on these properties (some are, some are not really and will come out with a different but acceptable texture) will fail.
While I tend to somewhat agree with the previous answer, raw eggs have more properties than just taste or binding. They have a binding effect, a rising effect, thickening effect, etc. Additionally they are part of the liquid ingredients in a cake.
You can't replicate the effects with only a cooked egg in
place of a raw egg. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't replicate the effects. It only means that you can't do it with just a cooked egg.
I'm sure that with the addition of the right liquids and the additional ingredients required to create the desired result, a cooked egg could be used.
No you can’t: chemical reactions do happen to the egg (not necessarily with the other ingredients) as the proteins in the egg are changed during the cooking process.
As a metaphor you can’t make a wall with pre-set cement as it can’t bind with the sand and bricks. When baking a cake, the egg acts like cement in concrete.
In Italy we go as far as cooking salty cakes with boiled eggs, they are decorative but can be peeled and eaten. We indeed put them in the oven with all the shell.
The recipe is from Naples, and is called Casatiello Napoletano Salato (Casatiello stays for little house, don't ask me why, the other two words mean neapolitan and salty).
Cfr.: www.lucianopignataro.it/a/ricetta-casatiello-napoli/70835
If shortcakes count as a cake, then I'd say yes. I've made James Beard's shortcake recipe several times, and it calls for two hard-boiled eggs (none raw), and the results are deliciously flaky. As mentioned above, this might better fit into the pastry category, though.
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