Classic Cakes

While traditional creaming involves beating butter and sugar together to aerate the mixture before adding the flour and wet ingredients, in reverse creaming you add the butter to the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, etc.) before incorporating the liquid; the butter coats the flour particles, therefore minimizing gluten development for a tender, fine crumb. Just as important, since the butter isn’t beaten with sugar, less air is incorporated, which translates to less rise and a sturdier cake—perfect for cakes where layers are stacked and frosted. Both methods produce tender cake, which you use just depends on your intention with the cake.

Excess doming in cakes can be caused by using a pan that’s too small for the volume of batter, or by a too-hot oven. To reduce doming in cake layers, we employ the reverse creaming method (see previous question) which produces flatter layers better suited to stacking, but we don’t stop there. No matter what method you use to make your cake, we recommend slicing off the domed top of your layers (a technique sometimes referred to as “torting”) with a long knife to create flat, stackable cake rounds.

It depends on what you’re making! A springform pan consists of a round, flat base and a removable circular collar that latches open and closed. For cakes that are too fragile to remove by flipping the pan upside down, a springform pan is key since it allows cakes to be unmolded upright. For recipes like the New York cheesecake in this class a springform pan is essential.

Using a hand-held mixer for mixing cake batters, though doable, will get tiresome. A stand mixer offers the luxury of hands-free mixing, which means multitasking—such as making additions to a batter or frosting as it’s mixing (essential when making a buttercream)—is far simpler. And with a motor more powerful than any you will find in a hand-held mixer, a stand mixer can handle bigger jobs. So while you can certainly make the cakes in this class with a handheld mixer, and we love them for whipping cream and egg whites, if you’re a serious baker a stand mixer may be worth the investment.