You make the perfect cake batter. It tastes like pure heaven. You bake it, and when you turn it out, you find that it’s full of air holes and pockets. Find out today how to stop this from happening!
I was asked over the weekend, “How do you get your cakes not to have those funky hole-y type textures and holes all throughout it?”. It was from that discussion that I realized they didn’t understand some basic cake-baking concepts – such as room-temperature ingredients, creaming butter, sifting dry ingredients, preparing the cake pans, and incorporating air pockets into the batter. Honestly, I tend to take for granted things that I’ve been baking for decades, assuming people know the basics—shame on me. Today, let’s cover one of the basics: air bubbles in your batter.
The type of flour you use is essential. When I make cakes, most of the time I use cake flour as it doesn’t have as high a protein count as AP flour.
What I was taught is, aside from an Angel food cake or a light sponge cake batter, if you’ve mixed it perfectly, all you need to do is give your filled cake pan(s) a few good (but not hard-slamming) whacks against the counter. I put a tea-towel beneath it and gave it a few whacks against the counter.
What this does is agitate the air bubbles to the surface, where they either pop from the impact or can be popped with a spatula.
Now, if you don’t feel comfortable doing that, you can always run a skewer, spatula, or knife through the cake batter after you’ve poured it into the pan. This will loosen the air pockets, allowing them to rise to the surface. However, I would still give it a few taps against the counter.
Keep in mind, those sponge and angel food cakes that NEED the air bubbles you would not do this as you want to keep the air bubbles/pockets.
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