LogFAQs > #923584768

-Preheat the oven before you start

-Grease your pans (cutting out a circle of parchment paper to line the bottom and also greasing that is a good idea) and give them a light dusting of flour before adding the batter

-Follow the recipe's directions for the number and size of pans to use. If you have to use other pans, don't fill them more than halfway, otherwise your cakes won't cook evenly and may overflow

-If you're using a creaming method (mixing butter and sugars together before adding other ingredients), temperature's very important. Make sure your butter's good and soft (room temperature is fine, don't melt it), and leave your eggs and milk out to warm up to room temperature (in a rush, put your eggs into a measuring cup full of hot tap water while you do prior steps and that'll warm them up)

-Sift your dry ingredients (flour, baking soda/powder, salt, cocoa if you're using it...). They'll mix into the batter better, plus sifting them together is a decent way to get them more evenly mixed

-Alternate adding flour (and other dry ingredients) with milk (and other liquid ingredients like vanilla). Do 1/3 of the dry, 1/2 of the milk, 1/3 dry, 1/2 milk, then finish off with the remaining 1/3 dry. With each step, mix just until everything's incorporated, then do the next step

-Once you've added your flour, be careful not to mix the batter too much more, since you can overdevelop the gluten and end up with a tough cake. Just go until everything's evenly mixed with no lumps or flour spots, then stop. If using an electric mixer, finishing the mixing by hand is often a good idea for this reason

-Don't confuse baking soda and baking powder. Everyone does this at some point, and it sucks because you basically have to start over again if you want a cake that doesn't taste like garbage

-Follow the recipe. Measure accurately and use the ingredients listed. If you have to make a substitution, research it instead of guessing, at least until you know enough about the underlying physical and chemical properties of your ingredients to make such guesses

-Check for doneness ~5 minutes before the low end of the time range the recipe gives you. If the centre of the cake springs back immediately when you gently tap it and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean, you're done. Relying entirely on the times the recipe gives you is risky because ovens are variable

Really, baking a cake isn't that hard, but there are a lot of little things to keep in mind as you go. At the end of the day, if you follow a decent recipe to the letter, you'll have a decent cake.

LinkPizza posted...

KJ StErOiDs posted...

If you're using frosting, don't use the pre-made stuff. Make your own.

Weirdly enough, I see more people bake cakes from scratch than I see people making frosting from scratch...

I'm guessing people see more value in getting to customize their cake than customize their frostings. With cakes, you have a wide variety of flavours you can make, which mixes can't ever hope to encompass. With frostings, as far as most people are concerned, there's vanilla, chocolate, and maybe cream cheese with different colours available (which are generally coloured better than you can manage at home, plus you can ignore the alarming amount of food colouring it takes to get icing that's not a pastel colour). You don't get too many home bakers considering things like Italian or French butter creams for their cakes (which is a shame because Italian butter cream is amazing).

American butter cream (butter, icing sugar, and flavouring) is still really easy to make from scratch, but I can understand people not seeing as much value in doing so.
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