In this tutorial I'm going to share all of my tips for making a moist and delicious vanilla cake!
First, make sure all of your ingredients are at room temperature. If they're refrigerated
like butter, eggs, milk take them out of the fridge 3 hours before you start
baking. When ingredients are cold they don't mix together easily but at room
temperature they'll incorporate easily, making the cake light and also preventing over-mixing
but more on that later. This is my very vanilla cake and the recipe is on www.britishgirlbakes.com
Creaming the butter and sugar together is really important because this is the base of
your cake batter so if this mixture is light and fluffy, your cake will be light and fluffy too!
Creaming takes about two minutes of mixing on medium speed and you'll notice the butter get
lighter and also it will look like it's expanding. Now the vanilla: most cake recipes will include
vanilla and using real vanilla extract will give you the richest flavour. Artificial vanilla is
cheaper but it doesn't give you the same result so it's worth spending a little bit more and buying
the real stuff. Now add the eggs but these should be added one by one, not all together for the same
reason I was talking about before: you want all of the ingredients to mix together and if you
dump the whole bowl of eggs into the batter it's more difficult for the butter and sugar
to incorporate the eggs than if you add the eggs gradually one by one, mixing each egg for about 30
seconds to combine into the batter. Buttermilk is a great way to add moisture to your cakes.
If your recipe uses buttermilk but you don't have any you can make your own very quickly and easily
by using milk instead, the same amount as the buttermilk listed in the ingredients but then take
out one tablespoon of milk for every cup and add one tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar instead.
Leave it for about five minutes to curdle and then add it instead of buttermilk.
My vanilla cake recipe uses oil too to make the cake extra moist! Once you start adding
the dry ingredients like flour, the way you mix your batter is really important. Mix the
dry ingredients together in a bowl before adding them to the mixer and that will spread the rising
agents evenly through the batter and through your cake layers. When you add the flour to the batter
the gluten in the flour starts to develop and if you over-mix the batter you'll make it tough and
dense so it's super important that after you add the flour you don't over-mix the batter. What does
this mean? Only mix the batter until you can't see individual ingredients anymore, so as soon
as the flour has incorporated into the rest of the batter turn the mixer off. Another tip for a moist
cake is to scrape down to the bottom of the bowl with a spatula after mixing in each ingredient.
The reason for this is that ingredients can get stuck at the bottom of the bowl where the paddle
or beater can't reach and if you don't scrape these up to mix into the rest of the batter you'll
have gritty chunks of melted sugar in your cakes or little dots or clumps of flour. Divide your
batter into cake pans and spread the batter with your spatula so that the cakes are flat and level.
I teach how to convert this recipe into different shapes and sizes of cakes and different quantities
of cupcakes in my Basics of Cake MasterCourse. Tap the pans a few times on the counter to knock air
bubbles out and then bake them until you can poke the top gently and the cake will slowly rise back
up. If you over-bake them they'll dry out. Leave the cakes in the pans for 10 minutes before you
turn them out and let them cool completely for three hours before you level or divide them.
I teach every step of making a cake from mixing and baking to making fillings and frostings,
leveling and dividing layers, assembling cakes, frosting and decorating, storing, transporting
and serving in my Basics of Cake MasterCourse on my online cake school. The link is in the top
of the screen and in the video description or go to www.britishgirlbakes.com Thanks for watching!