Bake a Chemistry Cake Do Over

In our first attempt we mistakenly used Self Raising Flour instead of  All Purpose Flour.  This was because I am Australian and we say “Plain Flour” rather than All Purpose.   This mistake set me off to look at what “Cake Flour” actually was …

What we did

Anyway we repeated our experiment and two lots of cup cakes:  with all ingredients and without baking powder.  And we got the expected result. 

The first one rose and the second stayed pretty much as flat as it started out.

It was more like undercooked pancake than a cup cake.

What we learnt

To make a cake, you need flour,  you need eggs, you need baking powder, you need oil.

We get it.

Posted by Annushka's Mum in Cup Cake Trials and tagged with
  1. One thing we want to investigate is the whole butter versus oil thing. Our rival recipe uses half butter, half oil. Why is that?

    Plus the baking powder. There are guidelines as to how much baking powder you add to a cup of all purpose/plain flour to turn it into self raising. But both our recipes use Cake Flour which is some kind of super duper flour for … cakes!

    So if Self Raising and Cake Flour already have leavening agents why do we add more? And why does the Rose Red Velvet Cake add so much more than our Red Velvet Cup Cakes?

    These and other intriguing issues are on our list of things to investigate.