If you’re baking bread, stick with all-purpose flour or bread flour. Those recipes need the extra gluten for the right consistency. Though cake flour has less gluten than all-purpose flour, it’s still not gluten-free.
You could try remembering this equivalency with a little rhyme like, “For an extra-fluffy cake, add 2 tablespoons to the bake!”
Accurately measuring flour is a really important part of baking. Too much flour in a recipe, and it will be dry and crumbly; too little flour, and the consistency of the baked good will be flat and greasy.
If there is excess flour sticking to the outside of the measuring cup, try tapping the knife against the container to knock it off.
Kitchen scales are also great if you bake a lot of European recipes. Instead of having to convert grams and milliliters to cups, you can just toss your ingredients on the scale and keep baking.
You definitely want to use a bowl of some sort to hold your flour. Putting the flour directly onto the scale will result in a powdery mess, plus you’ll have to clean your scale afterward.
If your recipe lists ingredients in grams and milliliters, you’ll simply sub cake flour for all-purpose flour and measure out how many grams are called for. If the recipe lists ingredients in cups, you’ll need to remember that 1 cup of all-purpose flour equals 128 grams.
If you have to add other ingredients to the cake flour, just zero out the scale and measure them directly into the same bowl.
Make sure your measuring cup is dry before using it. If it’s wet, the flour will stick to the inside of the cup and mess up your measurements.
Using accurate measurements is really important in producing a high-quality baked good.
If a recipe calls for 1/2 cup (64 grams) of all-purpose flour, you’ll just remove 1 tbsp (8 grams) and add 1 tablespoon (14. 8 ml) (7 grams) of cornstarch. Cornstarch helps inhibit some of the gluten in your recipe, meaning that what comes out of the oven should hopefully be lighter than if you were to just use all-purpose flour.
Sifting the flour and cornstarch together is really important in producing a light and fluffy baked good. If the cornstarch isn’t incorporated fully, the consistency of your baked good would be off in areas. If you don’t have a sifter, use a fine-mesh strainer or colander instead.
If you want to test if the cornstarch makes a difference, try baking 2 identical cakes. In one, just use all-purpose flour. In the second one, use the cornstarch substitute. Then, have a taste test to see if you can tell the difference.
