Cake with an impenetrable crust?

Question

I recently baked the golden vanilla cake from King Arthur FLour's website. It baked nicely, and looked really nice. However, when I was at my cake decorating class, I had to level and torte that cake, and for the life of me, I could not get my cake leveler to go through the cake! It just bounced off and would not go through the cake, no matter how hard I pressed, or sawed. I eventually resorted to using a serrated knife, but even that was incredibly difficult to cut through.

Is there something I did when making the cake? I know I used a 9 inch pan instead of the 8 inch it asked for, but that was the only change I made. Or is this just an impenetrable cake?

Answer 1

I blame the recipe, which calls for absurdly long mixing times, well past the point of overmixing.

After you add the wet ingredients, the recipe has you mix for:

• 30 seconds at low speed for the milk
• 30 seconds at medium speed for the milk
• An unspecified amount of time at low speed to incorporate the first egg
• 2 minutes at medium speed for all the eggs (30 seconds after each)

That is simply way too much mixing for a cake. Personally, I don't even like the concept of using an electric mixer at all, except to cream the butter. But that's over 3 minutes of mixing and it is simply too high. You'll end up with extremely tough, chewy cake, practically bread.

If you look at the top-rated from-scratch cake recipes on various recipe sites (e.g. Epicurious) you'll see that they all either call for incorporating the wet ingredients either by folding with a rubber spatula (best) or with an electric beater at low speed.

Beware of "manufacturer" recipes - I don't think I've ever had a positive experience with one. You would think that they are authoritative sources, but in practice you'll achieve much better results with a search engine and careful reading of the reviews.