yellow cake to remember

I bought a quart of buttermilk the other day to make that delicious toffee pecan coffee cake, and after the bars were all baked and gone – I was left with nearly a full quart of buttermilk.

Now, buttermilk isn’t one of those ingredients you can just pour into any old dish.  Sure, you’ve got buttermilk fried chicken…and yes, there’s buttermilk pancakes…

But what’s a girl who’s trying to cut back on fried chicken (yes, I eat it that often), and who likes to munch on granola for breakfast to do with a quart of buttermilk?

Apparently, put it in cake!

I wasn’t searching for this recipe, but when I saw that it contained buttermilk, I considered it a sign that I had to try it.  That plus 100+ rave reviews was a pretty persuasive argument.

Moist Yellow Cake

What you’ll need

• 3 cups of cake flour (if you don’t have this, use all purpose flour but replace 6 tbsp with 6 tbsp of baking soda)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1tbsp baking powder
• 1 cup butter
• 2 cups sugar (you could cut this down by 1/4 cup)
• 5 eggs (yes, 5….you might not want to make this too often)
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 1 1/4 cups buttermilk

What you’ll do

• By now we know the drill, right? First mix together your dry ingredients – flour, baking powder and salt
• Separately, beat your butter with a mixer until it is creamy and pale (this will take a few minutes)
• Add in the sugar, 1/4 cup at a time and continue to mix until well incorporated
• Add your eggs, one at a time
• Pour the vanilla into the buttermilk
• Mix the flour and buttermilk into your butter alternating between wet and dry
• That’s it! Simple and quick
• Pour into the cake tin of your choice and bake for around 20 minutes (less if using smaller cake tins) at 350

Strange to say, while baking, the cake smelled just like a boxed cake mix – almost too perfect!

But it was probably just the vanilla that enveloped my flat with warmth. So delicious!

The result is super moist and very soft.  A bit dense (perhaps regular milk, or one less egg could fix this), but definitely one of the better yellow cake recipes I’ve attempted (not out of a box).

this baking thing…

…is harder than I thought!

So I made a quick trip to the market for some baking ingredients to make some tasty cupcakes for Zack’s aunty who is cooking up a mean BBQ for our visit tomorrow.

On the menu:

Choco chip cupcakes by Martha Stewart

2 minutes in I realize I added the sugar into the “dry” ingredients by accident (ok, is sugar not dry!?).  But it’s OK – I recovered and my batter is looking delicious.

yummy!

While my lovelies are in the oven getting delicious, I thought I’d share a little cupcake history.  Cupcakes used to be called “1-2-3-4″ cakes because of the recipe used to make them: 1 cup of butter, 2 cups of sugar, 3 cups of flour and 4 eggs (plus 1 cup of milk and some baking soda).

Now that we’re all hungry for cupcakes, let’s see how they turned out!

Choco chip cupcakes by Mahira Sheikh

Yumm….hope she likes ‘em!