Do you wonder why is my cake dry and hard? Do you wonder why is my cake dense? Do you wonder why is my cake not soft and fluffy? Tried everything but still not getting answers? Well then, you are at right place.
Today, I am sharing all the tips and tricks to make any cake soft and moist. I have made hundreds of cakes till now and have come up with solutions to make your life easy. I am sharing all my findings to you so that you can save your time and efforts and use that to make the yummy cakes.
I promise you that, if you follow all the tips below, you will never have dry and dense cakes. You will always have soft and moist cakes.
- Measure your ingredients properly
One thing I have learned from my experience is, “Baking is science”. I always recommend to use weighing scale to make the perfect recipe each and every time. Once, I have just eye bawled the ingredients (from my full proof moist vanilla cake recipe) and it simply turn into complete disaster.
- Read your recipes
Whenever you are making any new recipe which you have never made before, it is always recommended to read the recipe completely.
- What if recipe calls for room temperature butter and you have cold butter? It is difficult to mix cold butter in cake batter.
- What if recipe calls for cold butter and you have room temperature butter?
- What if you do not have the proper ingredient in your pantry?
- What if you do not have proper equipment at home?
- Know your oven
Each oven is different, each ovens power is different. So, it is important to know your oven well. The best way to know if your oven is properly preheated, if it is running hot or cold, is to use oven thermometer. Test the temperature at different spots in oven while baking.
- Room Temperature ingredients
To make a smooth cake batter, it is important to use room temperature ingredients. This will also avoid over mixing which in turn will avoid denser cake. Below are some tips to bring ingredients to room temperature faster.
- Eggs:
Put eggs in bowl of hot water just for 5-10 minutes and you are all set to go.
- Butter:
How to check if butter is at right consistency? If you intend your finger then it should make a mark in butter but should not make your hand oily. If it is cold, then put it in microwave with 10 seconds intervals and do this procedure until its at right consistency.
- Milk:
Put it in microwave for 5-10 seconds are you are good to go.
- Buttermilk
Warm the buttermilk the same way you heat up the baby’s milk. Just put it in bottle and put the bottle in bowl of hot water for couple of minutes.
- Beating butter and sugar
Creaming butter and sugar is an important step in to make cakes, especially butter cakes. Beat it until light and fluffy. If you overmix at this step then this will definitely make your cake denser and unevenly baked. So, beat it until light and fluffy.
- Beating eggs and sugar
This is an important step while you make sponge cakes. Beat it until it reaches ribbon stage. Ribbon stage occurs when eggs and sugar are whipped together. This incorporates air into the batter and sugar is dissolved in the batter.
- How to identify ribbon stage?
When you lift the batter and make number 8 in the batter, it should stay there for few seconds and then disappear on its own.
- Soak with sugar syrup
This is especially used in layer cakes. This will keep moist for long period of time. Butter cakes are moist compare to butter cakes. Butter cakes are also combined with buttercream which helps to keep your cakes moist. So, it is ok if you skip this for butter cakes but sponge cakes are dry so using sugar syrup is important in sponge cakes.
- Use sour cream
This adds more fats content in the cake. This will definitely make the cake moist and soft. But, make sure to add little baking soda if your using sour cream.
- Use Oil
This will make the cake moist and soft but it doesn’t provide that buttery test. So, try replacing some butter with oil. I will strongly recommend using oil if you are using cake flour in the recipe.
- Doubling your recipe
Most of the times, it is ok to double the recipe but you have to make sure that you are not overmixing the batter because of more ingredients or undermixing the batter with the fear of overmixing it. Once, I doubled the recipe for my chocolate cake and overmixed it thinking it will take more time to mix the batter together because quantity has increased. This resulted in very dense cake and complete failure.
- Baking Soda or Baking Powder
Please stay away from replacing baking powder with baking soda and vise a versa. Each ingredient has their own role.
- Replace milk with buttermilk in your recipe
As sour cream, this also provides extra fat. This will make your recipe soft and moist.
- Use correct Flour
There are many types of flour available in market to bake cakes, like, all purpose flour, cake flour, self-rising flour. Many recipes also use wheat flour now a days. It is important to understand the difference between them and substitute for them.
If recipe calls for all purpose flour, then it is not recommended to just replace it with other flour by keeping rest of the ingredients same and vice a verse.
All-purpose Flour:
You can see many recipes on internet that uses this flour. This is very basic and easily available at your local grocery stores. If you compare this with cake flour then, this has more protein content (around 10-13% – varies as per brand). Protein helps to bind the cake together. So, if you use this flour, cake crumbs are tightly packed unlike using cake flour.
Cake Flour:
Cake flour has less protein content (around 8-9% – varies as per brand) if you compare it with all-purpose flour. This creates delicate crumbs and also a little dry cake. To make it moist, always use oil in the recipe which uses cake flour. If you do not have cake flour handy then you can make one at home. Just take our 2 tablespoons from 1 cup of all-purpose flour and replace it with same amount (2 tablespoons) of corn flour. If you have weighing scale, measure and replace by weighing your flour.
Self-Rising Flour:
This flour contains leavening agent (baking powder/ baking soda) added in it. Be cautious to use this flour in place of any two flours above because they are not interchangeable. If you just replace it without modifying rest of the ingredients then you will have more quantity of leavening agent which will make our cake dry.
Wheat Flour:
Wheat flour has maximum amount of protein so it will create much tighter crumbs amongst all. This results in dense cake. This is idea to make breads.
- Replacing ingredients
Without understanding the role of each ingredient, it is dangerous to just replace or omit an ingredient. This may result in complete disaster. I have always mentioned the importance of an ingredient in my each and every recipe. If you are a beginner then simply follow the recipe first, understand the basics, importance of each ingredient and then make changes to the recipe accordingly.
