The Best Yellow Cake Recipe

Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making a fluffy and tender yellow cake. So let's get started. First off, set your oven to 350 so it's nice and hot. Then lightly grease and add parchment paper rounds to the bottom of three eight-inch cake tins. Now let's get the dry ingredients together. Into a medium bowl, we're gonna add 3 1 3 cups or 400 grams of all-purpose flour. This cake is so light and fluffy and tender. It originated in the 19th century and is derived from a traditional pound cake, but here we're using baking powder, which was a new invention at the time, to give you a fluffier, more soft, melt-in-your-mouth cake. Using a scale is the best way to get perfectly accurate results. If you added too much flour in, the cake would be denser, like a pound cake. This flour has too much protein or gluten to give me that beautiful texture, so we're gonna cut it with some cornstarch. A third of a cup or 42 grams. I hate the way it sounds and feels. To fluff things up, one full tablespoon of baking powder and three quarters of a teaspoon of salt for some contrast. This is like the perfect birthday cake, a fluffy vanilla cake that melts in your mouth with a luscious, decadent chocolate frosting. All you need are some candles and you're good to go. All right, grab a whisk. By the way, if you like my videos, go ahead and hit that subscribe button. There's two new recipes every single week, plus shorts two. Whisk that until it's nicely combined. Now we can set this aside and grab our mixer. This is optional, but we might as well weigh our sugar while the scale's out. This recipe calls for two cups or 400 grams, and the sugar is doing two things. It makes it sweeter, but it also softens the cake and gives you that beautiful texture we love. When you reduce the sugar in a recipe, yes, the cake is less sweet and has less calories, but it also becomes more bready and hard. Very noticeable when you forget to add an extra cup of sugar into your cookie recipe and they come out of the oven fully domed. They never spread out because the texture's so different. Set that aside, and now we can grab our mixer. Into the bowl of our mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, we're gonna add three quarters of a cup of butter. That's 170 grams, and it's not just any old butter. It's unsalted room temperature butter. If you're making this cake on a cool winter day or any time other than the summer, room temperature is not the temperature of your room. It is a temperature which makes the butter nice and soft. Not melty, just nice and soft like that. There we go. Now we're gonna add the sugar in, and you might be thinking, hmm, that's a lot of sugar for that much butter. It is. We're gonna add some oil too. Most cakes come out of the refrigerator not having freshly been baked and iced that very hour. So we're gonna use a little bit of oil so the cake stays nice and soft even if it's coming out of the fridge. We're gonna mix this for three minutes on medium speed until it's nice and light and fluffy. Just a little bit of time later, you can see I have a nice and fluffy mixture. A lot of air got pumped into here. It's been lightened up, and this is gonna give us a beautiful texture as well. However, we need to add more fat here, so 1 1 3rd of a cup of a neutral oil, any one you like. It could be avocado, it could be a veggie oil, even olive oil if you wanna add that little bit of extra taste. I love the taste of olive oil, so I don't mind it. In you go, as well as one tablespoon of vanilla. This is the main flavor of the cake, so have a nice vanilla that you love. And unlike a white cake where you're like, oh, the vanilla's so dark, it's changing the color because you only used egg whites, here is a yellow cake, so this is perfect. Now for that signature golden color, we're gonna add the eggs. These give us some structure and extra richness as well. So we're mixing this on medium and adding four eggs into a separate bowl, one at a time. I don't wanna have any shells. That is not the texture that I'm going for. Two, three, and four. You'll see quite the difference in color looking down as opposed to looking to the side, so we should scrape the bowl down. But we're not done with the eggs yet because we have four whole eggs, but also three egg yolks for a bit of extra golden color and richness. Now we can separate the eggs using just the yolks. You could pop the whites into a freezer and make a meringue at a later time if you'd like. By the way, yes, this cake has a chocolate frosting. That's the traditional way to go. Any frosting would be wonderful with this, so you could have strawberry cream cheese, a vanilla frosting, anything you love. Salted caramel, they all work great. Now we can add our three yolks in. They incorporate so nicely and you can see my batter is so fluffy and it hasn't broken. The butter wasn't too cold. It mixed perfectly with the sugar and this looks glossy and beautiful still. I'm ready to finish the batter off by adding the flour in three additions, alternating with another secret weapon, buttermilk. I have one and a half cups here and the buttermilk is lightly acidic, which means that the gluten in the flour is not gonna be able to form those connective bonds which make bread so chewy and delicious or cakes so disappointing. It'll be even more tender because of this. If you don't have buttermilk, you could add in like a tablespoon and a half of white vinegar to some whole milk and mix it up. It'll be good. Mix on your lowest setting. Add a third of your flour mixture in, half of the buttermilk, another third of the flour, the remaining buttermilk, and the last bit of flour. And you notice I work pretty quickly because I don't wanna overmix the batter. I wanna mix it just until things are combined. In fact, I'm gonna scrape this down by hand and finish mixing the batter so it's just right. I've actually taste tested recipes where same exact recipe, perfectly measured out, followed to a T, but one batter was overmixed and it's wild. Not only does it change the texture so it's dense and gummy, it changes the way you taste because things dissolve on your tongue differently and even with the same spices, it tastes totally different and not for the batter. Measuring your flour out correctly, using room temperature ingredients, and not overmixing are the three things that you can do to make a cake perfect. Now, let's just fold this together and we'll have a beautiful, evenly mixed batter. Just hunt and pack for any little bits of unmixed flour in here. That looks great. For this recipe, I'm using three eight inch pans. However, you could do any pan you like, including cupcakes. These could be a nine by 13 inch sheet cake, which would be a 30 to 35 minute bake. If you're making cupcakes, fill them up about two thirds of the way and they bake for 20 minutes. And that would make 32 cupcakes, by the way. Three nine inch pans would be a 20 to 25 minute bake. I was a guest judge on Disney's Magic Bake Off, which was really fun. And for one of the episodes, the judges had to be the contestants. So we teamed up and made a holiday cake, but it had to be timed, which is a nightmare. Not a good person for timing. However, I was politely reminded that the bigger the cake, the lower the bake time. So I baked massive cake layers, but they baked in like 12 minutes because the cake had to bake and cool and then you had to make the frosting and decorate it. And it was like a multi-tiered cake in like two hours or something. It was wild. So stressful. This batter looks like it's somewhat evenly distributed. I'm gonna weigh it out so I can make sure. 951. 969. 967. That's fine. Smooth this out into an even layer using an offset spatula. The cake would self-level in the oven, but you want these to bake nice and flat since we're stacking them. So give it a good head start. And speaking of nice, beautiful, flat cake layers, we are going to make these perfectly flat using cake strips. If you bake cakes often, I recommend getting some. They're just damp fabric strips that you add to the outside of your pan. They cool the edge down and give the cake a nice, even bake so there's no doming. The cake will also have a softer side. It won't be crusty. So you sew your strips, ring them mostly out, and then just fasten them to your cakes. Once they come out of the oven, the strips will be bone dry, but your cakes will be super flat. And if you wanted to, you could make these cake layers in advance when you have some free time and feel like making cake layers. Wrap them really well and then pop them into the freezer and they'd last for about three months. Then take them out to thaw, decorate, and send that cake on its way. These cake layers are ready to go into the oven, 350 for 25 to 30 minutes. The center should spring back when lightly touched or you could use a skewer to make sure it comes out clean. In you go. My cake layers are cool, flat, and ready to go. So we should make a delicious chocolate frosting. I melted a quarter of a cup of unsalted butter and to that I'm adding a quarter cup of cocoa powder. This will let the cocoa powder bloom and you'll get a lovely super chocolatey flavor. That's a quarter cup or 25 grams. Give that a mix so it's nice and combined. Stunning. Set that aside. I want maximum chocolate flavor for this frosting so we're gonna combine chocolate chips and milk and get a beautiful ganache that gets mixed in for a silky rich buttercream. Half a cup or 90 grams of semi-sweet chocolate chips and a quarter cup of whole milk. Combine that in a heat safe bowl and we're gonna microwave this in 30 second increments, stirring in between until it's melted and smooth. Two bursts later and this is nicely melted. There's a couple lumps but I'm gonna set this aside to cool and as it cools the residual heat will melt the remaining little bits of chocolate. Now we can add the remaining one and three quarter cups of room temperature unsalted butter. You'll see that my butter is nice and soft. So if you're choosing to make this cake on a nice cool day, microwave your butter at half power for like 10 second increments until it is room temperature. Or you can use your favorite butter softening hack. There are many. In fact, I have a whole post on the blog of just about different ways to soften butter. You'll find that butter temperature can completely destroy your recipe. It's a little bit too firm. Recipe ruined. It's important to have room temperature ingredients, especially butter. Pop your paddle attachment on and we're just gonna mix this on medium speed for about a minute so it's nice and creamed up. Looks pretty good. Now that the butter is creamed up, we can add our cocoa mixture in. Delicious. This is definitely part of the recipe where you wanna scrape the bowl down because you will notice any nodule of unmixed butter in your beautiful silky chocolate buttercream. Okay. This mixed up very quickly. So now we can scrape the bowl down because inside it looks like luscious chocolate mousse, but the outside is probably pretty blank. Pretty light colored. Once your butter and cocoa powder are nicely mixed, we can add our sugar in slowly. That's five to six cups, 600 to 720 grams. It could be a little bit less sweet or a little bit more sweet, a little bit firmer, a little bit more slack. It's your cake, so do what you like. I would start with a lower amount and work your way up. Tasting occasionally. Add the sugar in slowly while mixing on low. Slowly add the sugar in. Trying to not make a mess here. It's so difficult. Tastes pretty good, so I'm gonna stop adding sugar in. I added five cups. Now we can add the ganache in. You just have to make sure it's room temperature-ish and not super hot. However, I almost forgot something very important, which is the salt. You could add the salt in when you cream the butter or when you make the ganache or when you bloom your cocoa powder. We wanna add half a teaspoon for some nice contrast. Sprinkle that in and give it a mix. Salt really helps you taste things. Otherwise, you could just have a flat, sweet dessert. Not the same vibe. Time to add your ganache in. This cooled in the fridge for a little bit longer because it was slightly warm to the touch. I don't love that. Every drop. Chocolate doesn't grow on trees. Mm. Didn't say cacao nibs. I said chocolate. Now we're gonna mix this on low until it's combined, and that does mean you will be scraping the bowl down one more time. If, for some reason, especially if you added a lot of sugar in, if this seems kind of stiff and not luscious, I would add some milk or cream, and a tablespoon at a time until you have the desired consistency. This looks great, however. Look at this. Once all the ganache is mixed in, increase to medium low and just mix this up until it's luscious and looks like it's perfectly swoopy. This looks great to me. I don't wanna pump a ton of air in because then it's just gonna be frothy. So I'm gonna stop here and get to assembling my cake. By the way, if you want an even more chocolatey frosting, you can just add more, make more ganache and add more in. I will caution you, however, that this darkens as it dries. So it looks like it's a light chocolate right now, but it'll appear darker once it sets. Onto each layer, we're gonna add one cup of frosting. This is a swoopy cake. You could decorate this however you like, but in my mind, a yellow cake is rustic and swoopy and really easy breezy, no stress. With an offset spatula, just smooth this out into a beautiful even layer and look at the consistency of that frosting. Now, the recipe says to invert this, let it cool completely on a wire rack, but it can cool in the pan as well. It's not a big deal. Next layer goes on. One more cup of frosting. Smooth that out as well. Last layer goes on and you can see how perfectly flat this baked. That's the top of the cake, no dome. Now, the remaining frosting can go right on top. Just before I do this, look how soft these layers are. That combination of oil and butter, the way we whipped everything up, makes this like a pillow, it's like a cloud. That's also the secret to a chiffon cake. All right, now we're going to move this on out to the side and get full coverage before we swoop. Just be slow and gentle because this cake is so delicate right now. I've almost got full coverage now. Just go slow, don't rush it, and also don't panic. You added a ton of frosting to the top of the cake. Just continue working it out and the secret of the swoop is there's not a ton of frosting on the outside. You're creating almost the illusion of depth with your palette work. You also want to go slow because this cake is so delicate and fresh that you don't want to disturb the crumbs. You want to get the frosting all over this cake before you start working crumbs out of the cake layers. Now for the fun part. Move your spatula around and get those beautiful swoops. It makes the cake look so inviting. This cake will be gone in a flash, but it'll last for up to five days in the fridge. Just keep it covered. Allow your cake to chill for at least 30 minutes so it sets up, then give it a slice, and just like that, it's ready to enjoy. It's so hard to describe. The texture of this cake is a fluffy cloud of vanilla that just melts in your mouth with this luscious chocolate frosting. It's the perfect combination. I hope you get a chance to make this delicious recipe, and if you like my videos, hit that Like button and check out my cake playlist.