Cakes & Sponges
Reverse creaming gives a tighter crumb, and here is why it works
Coating the flour in fat before any liquid arrives limits gluten development from the first second, which is the opposite of what…
Cakes & Sponges
Crumb, rise and the mixing methods that decide both.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Cakes & Sponges
Creaming butter and sugar is aeration, and the sugar crystals do the cutting
The pale, fluffy stage is not cosmetic. Sharp sugar crystals are tearing air pockets into soft butter, and those pockets become the crumb.
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Cakes & Sponges
A genoise has no baking powder, so what is lifting it
Whole eggs whipped warm hold an astonishing amount of air, and steam expands that air in the oven. There is no chemistry involved…
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Curdled cake batter is a broken emulsion and it costs you volume
The split you see when eggs go in too fast is fat and water separating. The cake still bakes, but with a coarser crumb and less…
Cakes & Sponges
Cake flour at 8 per cent protein versus plain at 11: what changes
Protein content sets how much gluten can form, and in cake, gluten is the enemy of tenderness rather than the source of structure.
Cakes & Sponges
Baking powder and bicarbonate of soda are not interchangeable
One is a complete system and the other is only half of one. Recipes that use both are doing two different jobs at once, and…
Cakes & Sponges
Sugar in a cake is structure and moisture before it is sweetness
Cut the sugar by a third to make a cake healthier and you will also cut its tenderness, its keeping quality and most of its…
Cakes & Sponges
Egg white foam is doing all the lifting in a chiffon or angel cake
These cakes have almost no fat holding air, so the meringue is the entire structure. How far you whip it decides everything that…
Cakes & Sponges
A loaf cake cracks down the middle because it is supposed to
The split is a consequence of geometry and heat, not a mistake. Understanding why it happens tells you how to control where and how…
Cakes & Sponges
Oil cakes stay moist in a way butter cakes cannot match
Butter is solid at room temperature and oil is not, and that single physical difference decides how a cake feels on the third day.
Cakes & Sponges
Folding is the technique that decides how much of your foam survives
Every extra stroke costs volume. Folding well is not about being gentle in a vague way, it is about a specific motion that mixes…
Cakes & Sponges
The skewer test misses more than it catches on a rich cake
A clean skewer means no wet batter at that one point. It says nothing about whether the crumb has set, which is a temperature…