Note that I called this a "batter" and not a "dough." The difference? Batters have a higher proportion of liquid, making them pourable. making the cake rise (unless, as I mentioned, you're using self-rising flour) and vanilla extract, which gives the cake extra flavor. After that, you need milk for moisture (the eggs alone will not be enough), baking powder and salt for leavening-i.e. Let's try it.ġ-2-3-4 Cake: 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour and 4 eggs.Īn old-fashioned yellow cake is sometimes called a 1-2-3-4 cake, a reference to the amounts of the cake batter's four principal ingredients: 1 cup of butter, 2 cups of sugar, 3 cups of flour and 4 eggs. You can make a basic yellow cake with common ingredients you may already have on hand. So if you think a cake mix will help you avoid measuring and mixing, you're wrong. When you make a cake with a cake mix, you have to add other ingredients anyway, usually water, eggs and oil. You can make a basic yellow cake with as little as eight ingredients, fewer actually if you don't feel the need to add vanilla extract (but it makes it taste good) or if you use self-rising flour (that's flour that already has baking powder and salt in it). If you've never baked a cake from scratch before, you probably think it's going to use a lot of ingredients.
I know lots of people use them.īut I don't anymore, and here's why: a cake from scratch is not that much more work and it's sure to be more interesting and probably tastier. As a child, when I wanted to make a cake, I used a mix, and I'm not alone. Mixes from the likes of Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines take up plenty of space on the baking aisle, along with their good friends: the ready-to-eat frostings. They promise to save you time to, although, as I'll discuss below, they really don't. They hold the promise of a bakery-perfect cake without much measuring or guesswork. Cook In 101 focuses on basic recipes and cooking techniques to help novice cooks get into the kitchen and make delicious meals in a reasonable amount of time.Ĭake mixes are so tempting.