Terrible Texture, What Did I Do Wrong?!
Baking By Tellis12 Updated 21 Jun 2008 , 4:10am by thecakebox
I use cake mixes when I bake but I'd really like to switch to making scratch cakes. My problem is that the times I've made a cake from scratch it ends up having the texture of cornbread! It's awful. What am I doing wrong? I haven't tried using Cake Flour and was wondering if this might be the problem, but I was reading the other thread people have going and a lot of people use AP flour with no problem except that it isn't as light as with cake flour.
Help, what do I need to change?!
Scratch cakes are a bit heavier than box mixes. they also have better flavor.
You may have to try a few recipes, and white cake is particularly difficult. You should use the kind of flour specified in the recipe. Follow the directions very carefully.
There are many recipes written with lots of very specific instructions, like how long to cream the sugar/butter, and how long to mix other ingredients. that is the one you are looking for.
If you use AP flour for baking you should omit two Tablespoons per cup. Cake flour is always best to use but I've found that White lily AP flour works just like cake flour. It's the only AP flour I would use for baking.
I don't know if you are doing this already, but it is extremely important for all your ingredients to be at room temp (eggs, milk, etc) you can curdle the cake batter by adding cold milk in certain recipes, HTH.
Here's a great website for learning to bake from scratch:
www.joyofbaking.com
Over or incorrect mixing is probably the #1 cause of scratch cake failures.
Cake troubleshooting chart:
http://tinyurl.com/2p5bdu
The WASC cake recipe is a doctored cake mix that you might wish to try:
(Reliability of a mix, but more homemade taste.)
http://tinyurl.com/2cu8s4
HTH
basically when your batter curdles it means your ingredients are not emulsified properly so that can definitely affect the texture of the finished product, hth.
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