Hi, I'm doing a step by step guide in baking an English vanilla plain cake! Hope its gonna be helpful to you!
The basic recipe I work with is quite straightforward;
Butter - 500g
Sugar - 250g
Flour - 400g
Eggs - 8 large
1 teaspoon(tsp) baking powder
1 tsp vanilla flavor
1 tablespoon alcohol
It's quite the simple cake to make and yet so amazing!
Now let's go through the baking process!
Measure out your butter and sugar and put in a single bowl and mix.
This process is called creaming, you could use a mixer which is the preference, but in the absence if a mixer, you can sure use a spatula manually. When manually creaming, make sure to move in only one direction, this is mainly to avoid trapping air bubbles.
You cream until the cream mixture, that is, the butter and sugar mixture, is fine and fluffy. You would know when its fluffy, you would feel happy.
If manually creaming, you can confirm if its fluffy by picking up some cream mixture on your spatula and see if it drops off... we want it to drop off.
When you're convinced you've creamed enough, then it's time to beat in! It's so called because of the motion applied. You basically beat it! This is the process of incorporating your eggs into the cream mixture. I advice you add your eggs in bits. So after you've properly whisked your eggs, add about half the content into your cream mixture and beat in.
When you've sufficiently done that, you'd know because the eggs would be well incorporated into the cream mixture, then you add your flour. This is called folding in. And that's also because of the technique. You do not beat the flour but use a folding motion.
Subsequently add more eggs, beat in, then add the rest of the flour.
Add your flavour and alcohol for preserving it...
At this point, our batter is ready to be put into whatever pans of choice and into the oven! Oven temperature should be set at 140°C if possible. Otherwise, use the lowest temperature your oven permits. Oven time is approximately 1hour. But be sure to keep an eye on it from about 45 minutes. We don't want our cake burnt, it isn't Bundt cake!
I hope you found this post really helpful.