Beyond its taste, the soft texture of a cake is often what makes it irresistible. If you have ever been disappointed by tasting a too-hard and dry cookie, follow the guide! Truck Mania gives you seven professional tips to obtain incomparable softness for all your cakes, marbled cakes, muffins, sponge cakes, or even pound cakes!
Table of Contents
Replace Butter With Oil
Using vegetable oil instead of butter in all your cake batters will give you a very soft texture after baking. Indeed, butter is a so-called saturated fat that becomes solid as it cools, whereas most vegetable fats remain liquid at room temperature. These physicochemical properties will then allow your biscuit to remain soft once cooled and, at the same time, keep it for much longer!
Preferably, choose a vegetable oil with a relatively neutral taste, such as grapeseed olive or sunflower oil. You can replace all the butter in your recipe with the same oil. On the other hand, if butter plays a significant aromatic role in your recipe, only replace part of it with oil. Avoid using coconut oil, which, like butter, becomes solid at low temperatures and will not allow your cookie to become as soft as you would like.
Replace Dairy Products With Fermented Milk
Fermented milk, sometimes known as buttermilk, is often used in baking because its effect on the texture of biscuits is remarkable. In biscuit dough, the acidity of the fermented milk potentiates the effect of the baking powder, making the biscuits more airy and soft and helping to break the protein bonds of the gluten in the flour, which is synonymous with a less elastic dough and, therefore, more tender biscuits. If you don’t have fermented milk when making your cake dough, you can easily replace it with natural yogurt or “homemade” fermented milk. Simply curdle milk using one or two spoons of lemon juice to do this.
Also Read: How Many Calories Are In Bread?
Replace White Sugar With Brown Sugar
Brown sugar, unrefined like bourgeoise or muscovado sugar, contains molasses, adding moisture and softness to pastries. Another advantage is its distinctive flavor adds character to all your biscuits. By replacing all or part of the classic caster sugar with brown sugar, you can prepare a cake that will remain in everyone’s memory!
Respect The Flour Proportions
Very often, a cookie that is too hard or too dry is due to excessive flour in the cake batter. If the mistake isn’t in the recipe, it may be in how you measured the amount of flour needed. Avoid using measuring cups that do not allow you to be precise enough as to the quantities of ingredients. Prefer to use a kitchen scale to precisely measure the weight of the different elements that go into the composition of your biscuit dough. Pastry is, above all, precision!
Don’t Overcook
This may seem obvious, but overbaking a cake or cookie can ruin the moist texture of your pastry and make it far too dry to eat. Unlike weighing ingredients, don’t follow your recipe exactly when cooking time. The recipes only give an indicative time. Each oven is different, and it is, therefore, essential to adapt the cooking time to the performance of your appliance. Then, monitor the cooking time of your biscuit by using a toothpick or knife blade to check cooking.
For more even baking of your biscuit (and even more so if it is a large cake), you can surround your mold with a moistened baking ring. The latter will slow the cooking on the edges and prevent your cake from being too dry at the edges. To keep as much moisture as possible in your cake and its softness, you can also place a dish filled with water at the very bottom of your oven during baking.
After cooking, unmold your cake as quickly as possible to cool it on a rack. By leaving your cake in the mold, you prolong its cooking even more and risk making it harder and dry much more quickly. But be careful; unmolding a still-hot cake is not easy because it is much more fragile than once it has cooled. So be extra careful and careful, and don’t hesitate to use a little force to lubricate the mold to make unmolding easier! You can line your mold with baking paper for easy unmolding!
Retain Moisture After Cooking
To prevent your biscuit from drying out after it comes out of the oven, wrap it while still hot in cling film or, failing that, in a clean, damp cloth. When you remove it from its packaging after completely cooling, you will be pleasantly surprised to discover a tender and soft biscuit.
Soak
If your biscuit is intended to be cut and then topped with cream, do not hesitate to soak it generously with vanilla syrup, fruit juice, or even milk, depending on what goes best with your recipe. Apply your soaking liquid to the “crumb” of your biscuit using a brush before garnishing your cake. The goal is not to soak the biscuit but to punch it to provide more moisture. That’s it, soft guaranteed!
Also Read: What To Do With Leftover Puree?
