Learn how to make cakes right from your Android device

“The cake is a lie”. That’s the phrase coming through my mind everytime I hear or see the word cake. If this meme doesn’t ring a bell for you it’s because you haven’t played Portal, a game where your goal was to escape the deadly-puzzle environment “guided” by a malefic entity, GLaDOS. All throughout the game that entity promises you cake (the main character is a robot) and the ability to feel and enjoy the cake, however as the game progresses the main character discovers that the cake promise is actually a lie. If you’re a gamer and missed Portal I strongly encourage you to try it.

But not always the cake is a lie, most of the times in our physical world the cake is a form of baked flour with sugar (in various forms) and optionally all types of fats. Disgusting presentation, huh? Wait till you hear this, in his book “The Penguin Companion to Food”, Alan Davidson traces the origin of the word “cake” way back to the language used by Vikings (called Old Norse, used up until the 13th century to get an idea of how old this is) when it was referred to as “kaka”. For Latin based-languages, such as the one I’m speaking, the word has a horrible resonance. But with all of this built up in my head I still cannot get my mind off the last cake I ate which was just like tasting little drops of heaven, a thing that my cholesterol would strongly disagree with.

Cake is part of our lives and we usually associate it with a celebration of a certain type, be it a birthday, a promotion or a joyful event we all have great memories that involve a cake or two. I was always on the side of the food tasters, not food creators, because I lack skills in cooking. However, if you’re the Jamie Oliver type, you can start making your own cakes based on the trillion recipes that are out there. Now it’s even easier to do it since there are apps for Android devices that will give you access to many cake recipes.

Cake Recipes for Android is an app that gives you access to hundreds of videos to help you in your cake making endeavors. Still using an old cookbook? Well the advantage of an Android cookbook for cakes is that you don’t have to turn pages and you get to see how things should be done. No need to turn pages, but it’s true that from time to time you need to pause what’s running on your tablet/smartphone, so if your hands are dirty you still need to figure out what part of your body can touch the tablet and is clean – you’ll figure out something. Here’s a video that shows you how a Gateau Molleux au Chocolate cake is being made (don’t drool on the keyboard):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1nJDDtv-5s

In the meantime, here are the other features of this Cake Recipes for Android app:

Free (with ads). The app is free to install and use, it will show ads above the videos you’re watching though. It connects to the internet to a particular website and that’s where the videos are embedded and you can watch the tutorials. This means an internet connection is required and used to view the cake recipes.
22 cake categories. All the recipes are organized in categories and subcategories. There are well over 20 categories, with cake names I haven’t even heard of: Angel Food, Birthday, Bundt, Butter, Character, Cheese, Chiffon, Frosting, Fruit, Gateaux, How to make Pop, Log, Marble, Meringue, Pound, Roll, Shortcake, Sponge, Tiramisu, Upside-Down plus a category for Other types of cakes and Technique And Tips for making cakes.
Hundreds of video tutorials. Each of the categories mentioned above has its own sub-categories, for instance the Tiramisu category has Tiramisu Cake, Easy Tiramisu, Chocolate Tiramisu, Strawberry Tiramisu, Tiramisu Cheesecake, Egg-less Tiramisu – 6 types of recipes each with an average of 3 video tutorials per page. So multiply that with 22 categories and at least an average of 2 sub-categories and say 2 pages for each subcategory (with 3 videos) and you’ll get almost 300 videos with cake recipe tutorials. Enough to bake for the entire neighborhood for years.