Would this recipe really work

Question

Found this coconut cake recipe in https://www.completelydelicious.com/southern-coconut-cake/

A lot of people indicated success with it, but several readers including myself got a really dense cake instead of the light and fluffy cake image posted in the webpage.

I'm a bit skeptical because the butter is not creamed, just added to the dry ingredients along with some of the liquid ingredients (1 cup coconut milk). In addition, egg whites are just slightly beaten before being mixed into the batter.

Im not an expert baker, but have successfully baked enough cakes to realize that as written, the above recipe for the cake may be missing some details.

Can somebody advise me if this cake is really do-able so that i can stop trying if its not.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

That recipe is going to be a problem -- it has flour measured by volume, and it compacts.

For the recipe to be useful, you need to know how the person measures their flour:

• dip and shake
• dip and sweep
• spoon and sweep

It's basically, do you just dip the measuring cup into the flour, compacting it more, or do you use a spoon to fill the measuring cup, which aerates it more resulting in less flour ... and then how do you level off the top of the cup.

This is why most European and professional recipes use weight rather than volume.

You also have to beware of differences in flour by region. In the US south, the flour tends to be more towards cake flour vs. the US northeast being more towards break flour.

So even though it calls for 'cake flour', if they're from the south, you'll want to use White Lily or some other southern brand of flour. But just because it says 'southern' in the name of the recipe, if it's someone from Maine who tested it, you'll want some other brand (I'm not even sure what the northern brands are).