Cake Baking Tips

Homemade Cake Flour
Why would I want to make my own cake flour? Because I prefer using unbleached flour and the cake flour in the grocery store is always bleached. This also works great for making your own whole wheat cake flour in which you would use whole wheat pastry flour in place of the all purpose unbleached. It also saves you money and you don't have to buy a whole bag of flour you may not get around to using before it expires.

Ingredients
1 cup all purpose or whole wheat pastry flour
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 sifter or fine mesh sieve
Carefully measure out 1 cup of all purpose flour into a bowl. Now remove 1 tablespoon and replace with 1 tablespoon of corn starch. You need to do this by the cup.
Now sift this into the mixing bowl you will be mixing your cake in.


Which Pan To Use
This is actually more important than you might think. I have always used glass pans and couldn't figure out why my cake edges were always overly cooked and a bit crispy and than I found out I needed to lower the temp when using glass pans! Here are some basic cake pan hints.
Shiny aluminum pans are best when you make a cake because they reflect heat away from the cake.
If you use a dark, nonstick or glass baking pan, reduce the oven temperature by 25º F.
Straight up the sides pan is much better for a layer cake than angled edged pans. they are easier to stack and will produce a much cleaner and straight looking frosted cake.
Use lots of vegetable spray and a cut to fit piece of parchment at the bottom of the pan for easy removal.

Removing Cakes From Pans

First cool the cake in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Cover a separate wire rack with a towel and place it on top of cake. Turn the whole thing over and remove the pan.