Scratch Baking

I have been obsessed with cake baking lately. I long ago mastered the chocolate cake. The batter, is simple and the texture is usually soft and moist regardless of whether I followed the exact directions to the letter.

This is not the case with yellow cakes.

Last March, for my mother's birthday I tried to make a simple yellow 1 2 3 4 cake from the Joy of Cooking. It looked beautiful, but the texture was all wrong. It was dry and had the texture of cornbread. I used regular flour instead of cake flour and did not reduce it accordingly. I'm sure I did other stuff wrong, but that was the main offense.

Then I got some cake flour and made it again for my sister's birthday and was much more particular about the instructions. It was better, it rose, but ultimately it was dryer than I'd like.

I had no idea how difficult it was to make a scratch cake correctly. I've been doing it all my life, but only recently I decided I needed to do it right.

My fourth foray into the 1 2 3 4 cake was almost perfect. I used castor sugar, AKA super fine sugar and it improved the texture immensely. The cake was soft and moist. I think I should have cooked it an extra couple minutes. The cake doubled in volume in the oven, but shrank down about 25% while cooling. It was almost too moist, but I think an extra minute or 2 in the oven would have fixed that.

But. It. Was. Delicious.

Over the weekend I made a couple of recipes from "Great Cakes" by Carole Matthews. I think I've got this thing down, at least with the simpler butter cake recipes.

Basically what I've learned is this: "room temperature" butter is much colder than I previously thought. It should only sit out for a half hour before you start creaming. When the recipe says "gradually add the sugar" they MEAN it. It takes a good 8 minutes of sprinkling it in 1 TBSP at a time to properly aerate the butter.

Also, when adding the flour and the liquid alternately, do it really fast. Shut off the mixer between additions if you can't get it in fast enough. Once it's mostly blended shut off the mixer completely and fold it together. Even on low 'fold' speed, it will bring up the gluten in the flour and make the cake dry if you mix it too much.

I love baking cakes. If we could eat cake every day, I would make one every day.

I'm totally serious. I love to make cake.

And I love to eat it.

Very hungry at the moment... Didn't cook tonight. Waiting for take out.