Everyone likes cake. Everyone loves a good, moist chocolate/banana cake. Most people think baking involves gathering the eggs, butter, flour, milk and mixing it away. Sounds easy, right? Baking seems easy, but baking a perfectly moist cake takes time and practice. It’s art when you think about it. You have to consider the flour, eggs, butter temperature, mixing, etc. So to help you bake that perfect moist cake for your mum’s 50th birthday, here are some tips to help you achieve that.

Getty Images/EyeEm/Paulo Sousa

Firstly, recipes are your friends. They exist for a reason to guide you along each step, so follow the recipe. Don’t substitute ingredients. Abide by each ingredient, and measure ingredients according to how it’s in the recipes. Secondly, all-purpose flour isn’t always ideal. All-purpose flour contains more protein content, creating an elastic, gummy texture to food. However, its high protein content means it produces gluten. With bread, this is great, but with cakes, we want it to be moist and fluffy, which using all-purpose flour fails to achieve. On the other hand, cake flour is lighter, softer, and less dense than all-purpose flour, which helps us bake light, moist, and fluffy cakes.

When mixing, don’t overmix; neither should you overmix the cake batter. Overmixing the batter makes the gluten overdevelop and produces a tougher-textured cake while undermixing your cake batter doesn’t get the ingredients together. Mix ingredients till ingredients are just correctly combined. Another mistake people make when baking is opening the oven multiple times to check on the baking process. When baking, opening the oven interrupts the cake rising process and causes it to sink, leading to a very flat cake. To prevent this, follow the time speculated on the recipe and open once or twice to check for doneness. Lastly, avoid overbaking your cake. A trick is to preheat your oven for ten minutes before baking time and check if the oven temperature is as stipulated in the recipe. After that, check whether for doneness when the minimum baking time indicated in the recipe elapses. Pay attention to these tips when next you bake, and see how moist your cake comes out!