For a light, airy cake, swap out whole eggs for egg whites. Use two egg whites for every egg called for on the box. Combine the cake mix with the ingredients aside from the eggs. Whip the egg whites separately until medium peaks form, then gently fold them into the batter.
Room Temperature Butter / Don't Over-Cream
Most cakes begin with creaming butter and sugar together. Butter is capable of holding air and the creaming process is when butter traps that air. While baking, that trapped air expands and produces a fluffy cake. No properly creamed butter = no air = no fluffiness.
Most cakes will call for a leavening agent like baking powder or baking soda. These create the bubbles you need for the cake to rise. If the flour you use is self-raising, it already has a leavening agent in it. Make sure your butter is room temperature, and beat the butter and sugar together until properly creamed.
The average cake mix calls for the most boring of liquids: water. Instead of using water, substitute whole milk or your favorite non-dairy milk (almond, oat, and coconut milk work especially well). The milk adds fat, which results in a better flavor and density in your cake.
Why does oil give cake superior texture? Butter is 18% water, so when the batter is baked, some of its liquid evaporates. Replacing the water from the butter with oil means there's more fat left in the cakes to ensure tenderness.
Milk: Add MILK, not water, when your box mix calls for liquid. The milk adds density, fat and, most importantly, extra flavor to your mix. Egg WHITES: Not adding the yolks to the cake makes the cake fluffy and whiter!
Mismeasured baking powder (too much or too little) may also give you a flat cake. Make sure you have just the right amount of this leavening agent to give your cake the right lift. And always be sure that you're working with good ingredients—expired baking powder can leave you with flat cake, too.
Lots of home cooks believe, as your husband does, that you can just add a teaspoon of fresh baking powder to the mix. While this may fix the problem of getting the cake to raise, it won't necessarily fix the problem of the cake tasting old or flat, and the addition of baking powder can contribute to an off taste.
Do professional bakers use box cake mix? You might be surprised to learn that many of the top bakeries use boxed cake mixes. They have definitely learned how to elevate boxed cake mix, for sure!
As with baking soda, the purpose of baking powder is to create air bubbles that give your baked goods their light, airy texture. There are two types of baking powder: single action and double action. Single action baking powder creates the carbon dioxide bubbles upon contact with moisture, similar to baking soda.
The main reason TO beat an egg before adding it is that the mixture to which you are adding is not going to be sufficiently mixed afterwards to homogenize the egg. That is, if you are adding the egg and then just "stirring gently", that's not going to be enough to beat the egg.
The cake with no sugar was very short and dense while the high-sugar cake was the most light and fluffy. Shocking! It seems that as the sugar holds on to water, it provides a venue for liquid to gas expansion that creates a great deal of rise in the cake.
A dry cake is usually the result of one of the following pitfalls: using the wrong ingredients, making mistakes while mixing the batter, or baking the cake too long or at too high a temperature. Once you understand how to avoid the common cake-baking blunders, you'll bake a moist cake every time.
Therefore, a powder added while baking bread and cakes to make them fluffy and soft is baking powder.
Milk in cake recipes, generally makes the texture lighter and stronger (thanks to the protein and lactic acid),. Adding the right amount keeps the cake from being dense. Milk (and other liquids) actually activates other ingredients in the cake batter like leaveners (baking soda, baking powder).
Water. You can use water in most baking recipes that call for milk. Use 1 cup of water and 1-1/2 teaspoons of butter for every 1 cup of milk called for in the recipe. The extra butter will help your baked goods stay moist.
Butter is always the best substitute for oil in cake mix. Butter is high in fat and will make your cake mix rich and decadent. You may even like cake mix made with butter better than when it's made with oil! Be sure to replace the oil with the same amount of melted butter.
Just one more egg will add extra moisture, fat, and a little protein, which means the cake will be softer and less likely to overbake and dry out in the oven.
However, if you add too many eggs to your cake batter, then your end result could be spongy, rubbery, or dense. Like flour, eggs build structure in a cake, so they make a cake batter more bonded and dense.
Eggs are responsible for giving baked goods structure, which means the amount you use directly affects the resulting texture. Using too few eggs will make your desserts dense, but using too many will make them rubbery. The explanation for this lies in the fact that eggs are made up of protein.