I baked a cake yesterday for my husband and I for our anniversary.  I used a recipe that I've used many, many times before (yellow butter cake), but for some reason this time the cake came out tough.  It's not terrible, just not as good as usual, so my question is, what do you think might have made the cake tough?  I want to make sure I avoid this problem in the future.  Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

AWhat kind of Flour did you use?

When something like that happens to a tried & true recipe there was usually is some kind of measuring mistake.  If you were distractged *at all* while measuring/adding ingredients you very well could have mismeasured, or forgotten to add some ingredient.  OR if you have any new ingredient it could be slightly off - just enough to make such a difference.

I used cake flour.

Is it possible that I didn't fluff up the flour enough before measuring and therefore got too much cake flour into the batter?

AI suppose that could be a possibility.. But i didn't see the part about this being a tried and true recipe. As kakeladi it's more than likely some error in measuring. If you were using AL flour I was going to say over mixing...since you used Cake flour it is possible but not likely over mixing is your problem. Anytime I have had a tough or chewy cake it's been over mixing

ok, thanks for the thoughts and opinions.  I may have been a little distracted yesterday and not measured as carefully as I usually do.  I'll be extra careful next time with this recipe and hopefully if will perform the way it usually does.