Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'll be showing you how to make my favorite vanilla cake recipe.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here! And today,
I am so excited to be sharing another carefully
tested, well-researched, and perfected recipe.
I first published this recipe several years ago.
I have a super old YouTube video of it, and I figured after over eight hundred five star reviews
it was about time we make a fresh, new video,
so let's go ahead, get our ovens preheated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit,
and let's get started. Now for today's recipe, we're going to be creaming together
butter and sugar, so I recommend either using a stand mixer
if you have one—just for the beginning, just for this part here—or an electric hand mixer,
which is what I'm using today. Now
we'll start with 1/2 cup, which is usually 1 stick, of
softened, unsalted butter. and we're going to drop this in a large mixing bowl
or, if you're using a stand mixer, you can just drop it in the bowl of your stand mixer.
Now butter is very important in a cake. It gives it a really nice flavor,
but, if we used all butter, it could dry out this cake a little bit,
so we're going to supplement the butter with a little bit of oil.
I am using canola oil today, but vegetable oil or any neutral cooking oil will work just as well.
You'll need 1/2 cup. Add it right in with our butter.
Next, we'll add one and a half cups of granulated sugar.
All right, now here's where your mixer comes in. We're going to cream these ingredients together
until they're a little bit lightened in color
and everything is nice and creamy and smooth.
All right, this looks pretty good,
so now we'll move on to our eggs. For todays recipe, you're going to need four large eggs.
Preferably, they should be at room temperature
and ideally all of your ingredients should really be at room temperature.
Now, we're just going to crack these one at a time.
We're going to add them one at a time to our batter,
and we're going to stir well after each addition.
You just want to make sure that egg is thoroughly combined,
then we'll add the next one. All right,
so that is four large eggs.
Next, we're going to be adding one tablespoon of vanilla extract.
We’ll stir that in as well. Okay,
at this point, we are done using our electric mixer, or you're done using your stand mixer.
We are only going to be mixing things by hand
from this point on. This is very, very important
for this recipe because if you continue to use an electric mixer,
you're very likely to accidentally overmix
the batter. This happens once you start adding the dry ingredients,
so switch to a spatula at this point.
All right, now we're going to set our butter and egg mixture aside.
You're going to need a separate bowl for your dry ingredients.
For todays recipe, we are starting with 3 cups of all-purpose flour.
It is very important that you measure your flour correctly.
If you have a kitchen scale, I highly recommend using it for this.
If you don't, you want to make sure you stir your flour,
fluff it up a little bit, spoon it into a measuring cup, and then level off that measuring cup
because if you pack in your flour, you can end up with a dense cake.
So, as I said, this is three cups of all purpose flour.
Next, we are going to add one tablespoon of baking powder.
It seems like a lot, but it's not. Next, we'll need 1/2 teaspoon
of salt—this is just table salt. And we will whisk these ingredients together
until they're completely combined.
Okay, now we're about to begin combining our butter mixture
and our flour mixture, but there's one more ingredient that you need before you go any further
and that is buttermilk. So, today we are using one and a half cups of full-fat buttermilk.
I used to advise people that they could use my buttermilk
substitute if they don't have real buttermilk on hand,
but I found the flavor just isn't quite as rich and moist
as I like it to be, so I really recommend using real buttermilk.
We're going to alternate adding our dry ingredients and our buttermilk to our wet batter.
It's just the nicest way to get everything evenly incorporated.
And, remember, we are doing this with a spatula at this point.
So I'm just going to add a bit of my flour
and you're always going to want to start and end with your dry ingredients.
I usually add the flour mixture in three or four parts—I’d say four parts,
and I usually add the buttermilk in about 3 parts.
You don't need to measure it, you can just eyeball it. Now I'm going to stir in this flour
until it's mostly combined. You can see it's not completely combined.
Now I'm just going to grab my buttermilk and I'm going to add about a third of that on top.
And then I'm going to fold in the buttermilk. And once that's mostly combined,
I'm going to repeat with the flour.
And we're just going to repeat
this until all of the flour and all of the buttermilk have been added.
All right, so we want to have a nicely combined batter,
but we really do not want to be vigorously mixing
this. We don't want to over mix,
but you also don't want to under mix, which can make baking cakes a little bit tricky.
So what I'm looking for in my batter is
I don't want to see any dry flour streaks.
I want to make sure the flour is completely combined.
I don't want to see any bits of buttermilk floating around either.
But if you notice a few small lumps,
typically that's fine. You want to make sure
there are no big balls of flour in there, but a few small lumps in your batter are generally
okay. I want you to take a look at mine. All right,
now I like to bake today's recipe in two 8 inch round pans,
and you're going to want to prep them before we bake our cakes.
I will usually just spray the sides of the pan with a baking spray. And this is a baking spray,
not a cooking spray. The difference is that a baking spray should be made with flour,
which is going to keep your cakes from sticking, whereas a cooking spray won't do as good of a job.
If you don't have baking spray, you can just generously grease and flour
the sides and bottom of the pan instead. Now,
I'm just going to use a little bit of plastic to help me
make sure the sides are well coated. And then for the bottoms of the pan,
I'm not super worried about those because I'm going to be lining these with parchment paper.
These are just rounds of parchment paper that I made by placing
my cake pan on the parchment, tracing around
it, and cutting around it,
so it fits perfectly inside the pan.
If you have parchment, I highly recommend doing this.
It is going to basically guarantee that your cakes do not stick to the pan.
All right, let's see if I can get this cake mix evenly divided.
I feel like that looks pretty good. We're going to take this over to our 350
°F preheated oven, where these cakes are going to need to bake for about 30 to 35 minutes.
You do not want to over bake your cakes
because that can make them dry and crumbly, but a good indicator to know if they're done
is if you touch the tops, if they spring back lightly,
they should not be jiggly at all. And I always also like to use the toothpick test.
This just means I insert a toothpick in the center of the cake
and it should come out either dry or with a few moist crumbs,
not wet batter. These look pretty much perfect,
so now I'm just going to let them cool in their pans for about—I like to do about 13 to 15 minutes.
And once they've cooled, I'm just going to run a butter knife along the edge of the pan
just in case there was any sticking. I want to loosen the cake from the edge of the pans.
And then we will carefully invert onto a cooling rack—and be careful
because the pans are still hot.
All right, now you're going to want to let these cakes cool completely.
You don't want them to be even a little bit warm, before we assemble our cake.
Now, what is better than vanilla cake with chocolate icing?
Today I am using one of my favorite chocolate frostings,
and we'll just quickly get this thing assembled.
Now, if you'd like, you can always level your cakes.
I very rarely do. And since this one's going to family,
I am not worried about bothering with leveling my cakes.
I will make sure to link to this chocolate frosting in the recipe description.
It’s so good.
And that is how you make the perfect vanilla cake recipe.
I hope you guys enjoyed this one. And if you're still making your cakes from a box,
I’ve got to ask you why because look how easy
this is. I really hope you guys try this one out.
And if you do, please leave me a comment. I'd love to get this recipe to over a thousand five stars,
and I always love hearing from you.
Thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time.
My favorite part.
You're going to love this.