Keeping your cakes moist

There are a lot of recipes out there that will give you the most delicious cakes. But for a novice you may not be sure what works best. Here are some tips to help get your cakes amazing everytime.

How are you measuring your flour? Don’t take your measuring cup, dunk it into your flour bag and measure it that way.

You’re essentially packing down the flour and that’s going to make your measuring off. Take one smaller measuring cup, and use that as a scoop, then transfer to the larger measuring cup by spooning it in. Then level off the top if you need to.

Are you over-baking it? Vanilla cakes seem the hardest to keep moist and you’ve got to really watch the baking time on those. Make sure to stick to the time requirements needed for each recipe.

Did you over-mix the batter, or did you mix it a different way than the instructions called for? Cake recipes have different mixing methods for a reason. There’s actually some science behind it and you get different results with different ingredients that you mix up in different ways. The next thing is that you don’t want to mix scratch cake batter until it’s completely smooth. If you over-mix the batter, it will change the consistency. You could get a flat cake, a gummy cake, a cake that’s got glue-like streaks in it or a cake that’s compact and too dense. All of those things will mess with the moisture and texture of the cake.

Oil and Butter cakes. Oil cakes seem to be more moist. A lot of the cakes made with fruit, like banana cakes, apple cakes and even carrot cakes, are usually made with oil and are very moist. But those cakes that use a lot of oil like that have either strong flavours like chocolate, or fruit in them, like apple and carrot. Using all oil instead of butter in a vanilla cake just doesn’t work as well. While oil cakes are very moist, just be careful about substituting oil for butter.