1-2-3-4 White Cake

Baking is scary.

For me, it is.

I don't know why I've always had so much anxiety about baking.  I've always loved to cook, but baking has always eluded me.  I felt that, with cooking, I could experiment more.  Baking is such an exact science.  It didn't make sense to me that I could come up with creative baked goods when I was so hesitant that adding an subtracting ingredients would throw off the consistency of the batter, baking time or final texture and density of the cake.

Over the last month, I did some experimenting with baking.  My goal was trying to come up with a definitive base recipe that I could adapt to different flavors.  Some were too dense, too dry.  Some didn't turn out at all.

Finally, I found a recipe that sounded easy to remember, and easy to adapt.  I initially tried this with self-rising flour, but felt that I got the same results with the recipe below.  It's a few extra steps to add the salt and baking powder, but it keeps my pantry de-cluttered by keeping me from needing to house yet another canister of flour.

Besides, if you're like me, you're a terrible grocery shopper who forgets to buy things like self-rising flour on the regular, so having this recipe comprise all the ingredients I remember to keep stored in my kitchen is really helpful for me.

Before I tried this, I checked to make sure I was at the best possible altitude for this particular measurements.  Living at the base of the Adirondacks, I live around 400 feet above sea level, so these measurements were perfect to create a dense, moist, bakery-style cake.

Now that I've found a killer cake recipe, I'll be trying out variations and flavors very soon.

Not to mention... new buttercream flavors!












1-2-3-4 White Cake

1 tsp salt
1 cup butter, room temperature
1 cup milk
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp baking powder
2 cups sugar
3 cups all-purpose flour
4 eggs


Preheat oven 350F.

Combine all ingredients in a stand mixer.  Mix until smooth,

Distribute the batter evenly between 3 greased 9" pans.

Bake for 30 minutes.

Ice with your favorite buttercream,