Eating Healthier in Today's World

How to Make Lighter Cakes, Cupcakes and Muffins (What neither your mom nor Betty Crocker told you)

Nothing can be more frustrating in baking, when you have spent some good quality time making your own scratch cake and then when it bakes it hardly rises and when you eat it, turns out to be quite dense!  Continuing on with our thread of making better soft baking goods like cakes, pastry etc., I am going to talk about how to get better, lighter and more flavourful baked goods, focusing this time on cakes, cupcakes and muffins.  Our recipes are at the bottom of the page.

Shortening, Eggs and Sugar:  To start with all ingredients should be at room temperature.  Generally speaking the first thing that we put into our mixing bowl is the shortening, sugar and eggs.  Always beat the sugar and shortening until it is fluffy.  The colour of the shortening or butter should be almost white once it is thoroughly beaten.  This is the start of getting the lightness in the cakes and cupcakes.  The eggs should be separated from the shell over a separate bowl (to make sure you are not getting any shells in the recipe) and then added one at a time, mixing in well, after each addition, and stopping the Bosch and scraping the bowl down before adding the next one.  The eggs need to be well mixed but not overbeaten.  If overbeaten they will make the muffins or cake hard.  Basically they act as the glue to hold the cake together.  They will also help lighten the crumb so the cake is tender. 

Flour:  You will get the best results with a cake or pastry flour which is available at most grocery stores.  All -purpose flour will work as well but again the results won't be as good.  Our healthier customers can use Soft wheat flour that they have milled themselves or Barley flour also works well.  You can soften Hard wheat flour by add about 1/4 cup of cornstarch for each 3/4 cup of flour you are adding makiing 1 cup in total.  The cornstarch will tone down the gluten in the hard wheat.  One of the biggest mistakes in the soft baking of cakes, cupcakes and muffins is that most of us beat the mixture too much once the flour is added.  This is one of the main reasons your cakes don't rise well and turn out dense is that you have developed the gluten in the flour too much.  To avoid this there are a couple of suggestions I will make.  First, sift your dry ingredients together well.  We have a new sifter attachment for our Bosch Universals that we love and it does a great job of adding air to the flour and sifting out the larger particles.  Second, add the flour to the batter at the same time as your are putting the extra liquid in.  Sprinkle it around the bowl so get an even spread in the mixture.  Third , when using the Bosch Kitchen Machines for making the cakes, use the cookie/sbatter whips to do the mixing.  We find that they don't beat the mixture as well as the regular whips that come with the Bosch machines so again the gluten in the flour is less likely to develop.  And finally Fourth, don't leave the machine on very long once the flour is added.  20 sec. should be sufficient just to mix in the flour and other dry ingredients along with any other liquid.

Milk or Sour Cream:  I have found that a lot of really good Pastry Chef recipes use the sour cream instead of milk.  I have found that in my experiments that again the result tastes much better and the product is lighter and hold together better.  Usually I jog the Bosch machine a few times on the pulse switch and that seems to do the job.  A few lumps in the mixture will not hurt.  So long as you have beaten the shortening, sugar and eggs until really fluffy, you do not have to beat in the flour and any other flavouring or liquid ingredient (or even dry ones, like carrots, nuts etc for carrot cake).

Once the batter for the muffins or cakes is made it will keep up to two weeks in the fridge to make a fresh batch when you need to.

Cake Mixes (Cheaters): Because cake mixes have everything already in them except the eggs, water and oil.  It is really hard to add the air to the mixture like we can do with the scratch baking.  My best advice is to ignore the instructions on the back of the box that tell you to beat for 2 min.  That is fine for other mixers like a Kitchen Aid, but if you have a Bosch that will really overdevelop the flour and you will get a dense result.  Better again to use the cookie/batter whips and only mix about 1/3 of the time for about 40 sec.  That should do enough mixing without over beating the flour.

Red Velvet Cupcakes            Waldorf Carrot Cake          Blueberry Muffins