Contents
The plain vanilla butter cake — white or yellow — under buttercream and sprinkles. It is the American default birthday cake, and it is worth having one reliable version because the failure modes are all structural: domed layers, crumbs in the frosting, a cake that slides sideways.
The technique here is reverse creaming, which produces the fine, tight, slightly velvety crumb of a good bakery cake.
What makes it work
- Reverse creaming. Butter is beaten into the dry ingredients first, coating the flour with fat before any liquid arrives. Less gluten develops, so the crumb is finer and flatter-topped than a conventionally creamed cake. See cakes.
- Cake flour, or flour cut with cornstarch. 7–8% protein. Substitute 30 g of cornstarch per 150 g of all-purpose flour.
- Bake at 165 °C with damp strips round the tins. A wet strip of towel pinned round the outside slows the edge and the layer bakes flat — no doming, no trimming.
- Crumb coat, then chill. A thin skim of frosting to trap crumbs, 20 minutes in the fridge, then the real coat. This is the single technique that separates a tidy cake from a messy one.
- Room-temperature buttercream, cold cake. Cold layers do not tear.
Ingredients
Three 20 cm layers. Serves 16.
Cake:
- 400 g cake flour
- 400 g granulated sugar
- 14 g baking powder
- 6 g fine salt
- 280 g unsalted butter, softened and cubed
- 6 eggs, room temperature
- 300 ml whole milk or buttermilk, room temperature
- 2 tbsp vanilla — see Pure vanilla extract
American buttercream:
- 450 g unsalted butter, softened
- 900 g powdered sugar, sifted
- 120 ml double cream or milk
- 1 tbsp vanilla
- 4 g fine salt
Method
Heat the oven to 165 °C / 325 °F. Butter and line three 20 cm tins.
Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt on low for 30 seconds. Add the butter a cube at a time with the mixer running, and beat until the mixture looks like damp sand, about two minutes.
Whisk the eggs, milk and vanilla together. Add a third to the flour mixture and beat one minute on medium — this is where the structure is built. Add the rest in two additions, beating 20 seconds each.
Divide by weight. Bake 25–30 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. Cool ten minutes, turn out, and cool completely — or wrap and refrigerate, which makes frosting much easier.
Beat the butter five minutes until white, add the sugar in three additions, then the cream, vanilla and salt. Beat two minutes more.
Stack with about 150 g of buttercream between layers, crumb coat, chill 20 minutes, then finish.
Notes
- Funfetti is this batter with 150 g of jimmies — the rod-shaped sprinkles — folded in last. Nonpareils bleed; jimmies do not.
- Weigh the tins. Eyeballing three layers is how a cake ends up wedge-shaped.
- Keeps three days under a dome at room temperature. Unfrosted layers freeze for three months and are easier to frost from frozen.
Elsewhere on the site
Method and theory: Cake recipes · cakes · Types of Frostings · flour
Nearby: victoria sponge · red velvet cake · devils food cake