Today’s Post
I don’t know about you, but lately, we have been baking a lot of cakes. Between summer birthdays and preparing our autumn recipes, which for some reason include a lot of cakes this year, I feel like it is the perfect time to share today’s blog post. In the past, we have shared a few posts in our “Recipe For Success” series, including tips for home bakers, tips for baking bread, tips for baking with yeast, tips for baking Danish pastries, and cooking tips for beginners. We hope that by reading these posts, you learn something new. Or at least know what to fix if a recipe goes wrong! Honestly, we only learned these tips through plenty of trial and error. Like anything, getting better at baking requires plenty of practice, so enjoy today’s post and go get baking!
1. Follow the recipe!
This tip may sound so incredibly obvious that it’s not worth writing much more. However, it’s something that even I sometimes forget! When it comes to some baked goods, they are far more forgiving when it comes to adjusting the ingredients. For example, I use a base recipe to make bread, but I tend to mix in whatever I want. This might mean adding a bit of rye flour, some sunflower seeds, grated carrots, or even raisins.
With cake recipes, I would not recommend doing this. Of course, some ingredients can be swapped, like our apple cake, in which you can easily change out the apples for another fruit. However, deciding to change the other ingredients, like flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and leavening agents, could have a drastic impact on the final cake. This is particularly true in terms of texture, baking time, and taste. Do so at your own risk!
2. Room-temperature ingredients can make or break your cake
Along the same lines as the previous tip – when a recipe says to use room temperature ingredients, make sure they are actually room temperature! And no, this doesn’t mean microwaving your butter until it is half-softened, half-melted. The butter should be the same texture throughout, and a microwave does not heat it evenly. That being said, we’ve done that plenty of times 😂 . But it is much better to take everything out of the fridge ahead of time! Why is that? Well, when you add ingredients that are cold into a cake batter, it can cause the batter to split. This leads to a cake that doesn’t rise as well or lacks a nice and tender texture. This is so important when it comes to cakes like pound cake, which is made with a lot of butter.
A quick tip for eggs – if you place them in a bowl of warm water (not hot!) for about 15 minutes, replacing the water once it has gone cold, then they will come to room temperature a bit faster. And actually, some cake recipes made with oil instead of butter are a bit more forgiving. So, they are my go-to cakes when I don’t feel like being super precise. Things like banana bread are typically just a process of mixing dry into wet ingredients, or mixing it all in one bowl, so you can always turn to cakes like that instead.
3. Don’t overmix or undermix your batter
Now, this may sound almost like a joke. How can you avoid overmixing and undermixing? The truth is that you can’t get it perfect every time, but for the perfect cake, you should mix the batter just to combine everything evenly. Undermixing can leave the ingredients unevenly scattered throughout the batter. This is an issue when your leavening agents, or the additions that help the cake rise (think baking powder and baking soda), are not evenly distributed. Or, you might end up with pockets of dry flour in the final cake – not what you want! On the other hand, overmixing makes the final cake tough and flat, because you have overworked the flour and knocked out the air. To avoid this, always mix with the paddle attachment on your stand mixer or a rubber spatula by hand. You can definitely start out with a whisk for the wet ingredients but always switch to a gentler utensil when mixing the final batter.
4. Line your cake tins!
This is one of those instances where if you know, you know. If you have never felt the absolute pain and despair of baking a cake only to find that you can’t get it out of the cake tin, then you may think this tip is obvious. However, I can promise you that it’s not. Unless you have an excellent non-stick pan (and even then, I wouldn’t trust it 😂 ), you should line your cake tins with parchment paper and spray/butter. For round tins, I like to cut out a circle for the bottom of the tin and then spray/butter the sides. Alternatively, for loaf cakes, I find that spraying/buttering the entire tin works well, and sometimes in a rush I will just crumple up a piece of parchment paper and stuff it into the tin. If you are using a more complex tin, like for a bundt cake, I would recommend butter and then a layer of flour. Some people also use sugar but I have never tried that!
5. Check your cake with a toothpick/knife for doneness
Your cake is in the oven and you have set a timer according to the recipe. But how do you actually know when you can take it out? Every oven is different, which means the baking time could vary, potentially by a lot depending on the recipe, cake tin size, cake tin material, oven type, oven temp, etc. Luckily, there is a reasonably foolproof way of knowing that your cake is ready! We like to use the toothpick/knife test. This means inserting a toothpick/knife into the center of the cake, around when the recipe says it should be done. Although, if your oven runs hot, maybe check it 5 minutes before. If the toothpick comes out with batter on it, give the cake another few minutes and check it again. If it comes out clean or has a few crumbs on it that don’t look like raw batter, then you should remove it from the oven to cool. Remember that cakes cook slightly more when they come out of the oven in the hot cake tin, so you don’t want to wait until it’s dark brown and super dry inside.
Thanks for reading!
We hope that this post has taught you something new, or at least inspired you to bake a cake! Cakes are one of the best things to bake because not only are they delicious, but you can also decorate them and jazz them up for special occasions. Again, thanks for reading, and please leave a comment below if you have anything to share!
