Ready to take a crack at baking French Gateau? Don’t forget to pick up some Alsa baking powder first, though it’s hard to miss with Alsa’s famous pink packaging.

Unlike most of the brands found in common American grocery stores, Alsa is a single-acting powder, meaning as soon as it mixes with liquid ingredients it creates the gases necessary for leavening. Those common grocery store baking powders are mostly double-acting powders, which means they release gas in two stages of the baking process. So make sure you’re able to stick your cake batter into the oven as soon as you’ve got it or it might just go flat!

If you were wondering if Alsa has anything to do with Alsace, France then you’d be right. Founded in 1897 by Emile Moench, Alsa was created in Alsace just four years after it was relinquished to Germany after the war of 1870-1871. At the time Moench worked for the wagons-lit as an aide cuisinier before traveling to Vienna. It was there that he learned about baking powder, as it was still under development and not invented until 1891 by August Oetker of Germany. He took what he learned back to France and opened a small fine food shop, selling flans and cakes made with his product.

Eventually he began to commercially produce the baking powder from a factory in Nancy. And those famous pink packets? They can always be found with a stork, the symbol of Alsace, or a woman in an Alsatian headdress. Each package contains seven sachets with about a tablespoon of baking powder in each one.

Each pack contains 7 sachets; each sachet contains about 1 tablespoon of baking powder.