Cakes are really difficult, especially when you don’t understand why a recipe is asking you to do something or how to make the cake look like the flawless picture next to the recipe in the cookbook. Well, here are a few tips to get you thinking about what makes a perfect cake and how to make one yourself!
Basically, the goal of most bakers when making a cake is to achieve a certain lightness. To achieve this delicate texture, there are several practices that you can incorporate. To create lightness in cakes, usually air is used.
1. Use chemical leaveners: chemical leaveners react with either heat, acid, or liquid to create carbon dioxide that create air bubbles that expand in the oven to create a light and fluffy cake. First, baking soda reacts with acid to create these air bubbles. Therefore, for baking soda to be useful, acids are required to be added to the cake such as lemon juice, cocoa powder, yogurt, brown sugar, buttermilk, or sour cream. Baking powder, on the other hand, is a mixture of baking soda and cream of tartar (an acid). It is used if you do not want to add an acid to your cake.
2. Beat butter and sugar together before making your cake: when you cream room temperature butter and sugar together, the sugar crystals are incorporated into the butter, creating microscopic air bubbles.
3. Add eggs: egg yolks act as emulsifiers, agents that can allow two things that do not dissolve into one another to be joined together such as oil and water. In cakes, eggs emulsify the water and the fats so that the dough is able to retain more air, creating more air bubbles to increase the delicate texture of the cake. Egg whites are also very important to baking. When you whip them, the protein strands are uncoiled to create little pockets of air. Another way to increase the amount of air created is to add a little bit of sugar since the sugar is able to hold the protein strands in their place. Beware, however, because if you whip the egg whites for too long, the protein strands snap and release the water and air pockets, leaving you with water that has separated from the proteins and no more air pockets.
Flour: flour provides the main structure for you cake. There are several different types of flour, and some people are confused about what the difference is between them and which ones should be used when baking. Basically, bread flour has a high gluten content and cake flour has a low gluten content. When you are making a cake, you don’t want too much gluten in your flour as this will cause the cake to be chewy and tough. This is why cake flour is ideal for making cakes because it has a low amount of gluten.
Butter: butter’s main purpose is to coat the flour particles so that when you add liquid to the flour, there is a limited amount of gluten formation.
Sugar: many people believe that sugar only serves to add sweetness to what we bake, but sugar has many properties that help the structure of cakes. First, sugar attracts water and adds moisture to the cake, it helps in creaming butter to add air bubbles, and it cuts through gluten strands which are unwanted. Sugar also is important to the maillard reaction. This reaction is the reaction between amino acids and sugar that creates browning and therefore new flavour compounds.
Now, after understanding all of these principles about what makes a good cake, here is a cake recipe from the bakery Flour, in Boston that incorporates all of these principles. Try to use the weight rather than the volume as there is a great deal of variation that can occur when judging ingredients by volume.
Yellow Cake
1 ½ cups of unsalted butter at room temperature
2 cups of granulated sugar (400g)
3 eggs
3 egg yolks
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
3 cups of cake flour (360g)
1 teaspoon of baking powder
½ teaspoon of baking soda
1 cup (240g) of nonfat buttermilk
½ teaspoon of salt
Beat the flour and the sugar together until creamed- about 5 minutes.
Next, mix the eggs and egg yolks in slowly, one by one, to make sure they are added evenly.
Combine all of the dry ingredients in a large bowl, and then add in the buttermilk and the dry mixture using the 3:2 method, adding in the two mixtures gradually in this sequence.
Dry
Buttermilk
Dry
Buttermilk
Dry
When the batter is incorporated, pour it in a 9 inch greased pan and bake until golden brown.