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In this tutorial I'm going to share all of my tips for making a moist and delicious vanilla cake
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First make sure all of your ingredients are at room temperature. If they're refrigerated like
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butter, eggs, milk, take them out of the fridge three hours before you start baking. When ingredients
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are cold they don't mix together easily but at room temperature they'll incorporate easily
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making the cake light and also preventing over mixing but more on that later. This is my very
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vanilla cake and the recipe is on britishgirlbakes.com. Creaming the butter and sugar together is really
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important because this is the base of your cake batter so if this mixture is light and fluffy
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your cake will be light and fluffy too. Creaming takes about two minutes of mixing on medium speed
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and you'll notice the butter get lighter and also it will look like it's expanding. Now the vanilla
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Most cake recipes will include vanilla and using real vanilla extract will give you the richest
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flavour. Artificial vanilla is cheaper but it doesn't give you the same result so it's worth
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spending a little bit more and buying the real stuff. Now add the eggs but these should be added
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one by one, not all together, for the same reason I was talking about before. You want all of the
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ingredients to mix together and if you dump the whole bowl of eggs into the batter it's more
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difficult for the butter and sugar to incorporate the eggs than if you add the eggs gradually one
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by one, mixing each egg for about 30 seconds to combine into the batter. Buttermilk is a great way
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to add moisture to your cakes. If your recipe uses buttermilk but you don't have any, you can make
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your own very quickly and easily by using milk instead, the same amount as the buttermilk listed
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in the ingredients, but then take out one tablespoon of milk for every cup and add one tablespoon of
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lemon juice or vinegar instead. Leave it for about five minutes to curdle and then add it instead of
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buttermilk. My vanilla cake recipe uses oil too to make the cake extra moist. Once you start adding
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the dry ingredients like flour, the way you mix your batter is really important. Mix the dry
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ingredients together in a bowl before adding them to the mixer and that will spread the rising agents
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evenly through the batter and through your cake layers. When you add the flour to the batter
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the gluten in the flour starts to develop and if you over mix the batter you'll make it tough and
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dense so it's super important that after you add the flour you don't over mix the batter
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What does this mean? Only mix the batter until you can't see individual ingredients anymore
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so as soon as the flour has incorporated into the rest of the batter, turn the mixer off. Another
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tip for a moist cake is to scrape down to the bottom of the bowl with a spatula after mixing
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in each ingredient. The reason for this is that ingredients can get stuck at the bottom of the
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bowl where the paddle or beater can't reach and if you don't scrape these up to mix into the rest
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of the batter you'll have gritty chunks of melted sugar in your cakes or little dots or clumps of
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flour. Divide your batter into cake pans and spread the batter with your spatula so that the cakes are
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flat and level. I teach how to convert this recipe into different shapes and sizes of cakes and
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different quantities of cupcakes in my Basics of Cake Master Course. Tap the pans a few times on
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the counter to knock air bubbles out and then bake them until you can poke the top gently and
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the cake will slowly rise back up. If you over bake them they'll dry out. Leave the cakes in the pans
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for 10 minutes before you turn them out and let them cool completely for three hours before you
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level or divide them. I teach every step of making a cake from mixing and baking to making fillings
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and frostings, leveling and dividing layers, assembling cakes, frosting and decorating, storing
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transporting and serving in my Basics of Cake Master Course on my online cake school. The link
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is in the top of the screen and in the video description or go to britishgirlbakes.com
