Making High Ratio Yellow Cake

Sheet cake lovers, this is your cake. It’s as close as you can get to a commercial sheet cake consistency without the high ratio flour and emulsified shortening that the pros use. It’s great for stacking and decent for carving (though if you really want to get serious about cake theatrics you’ll want to do a google search for “durable cake recipe”). But of course the main reason people like a sheet cake is for the decorating potential. Quite a canvas they present, oh yes they do.

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Making High Ratio Chocolate Cake

For those looking to imitate the sort of chocolate cake you get from a boxed mix, or you want a chocolate sheet cake like like you’d get from a larger commercial bakery, this is your ticket. This cake has the tight crumb and relative durability you want, plus it bakes up well in broad cake pans. This formula is enough for one 11″ x 14″ x 2″ sheet cake pan or three 8″ x 2″ round layer pans. It can be easily scaled up or down depending on your needs.

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Yellow vs. Chocolate Cake Formulas

Why is it so much more complicated to do a chocolate version of a standard yellow layer cake? That’s what readers Cynthia, Bertie, Doug and Seth all want to know. Why, if you’re converting a yellow cake to a chocolate cake, can’t you just swap out some cocoa powder for some of the flour and be done with it?

A chocolate cake layer certainly starts that way, Cynthia, Bertie, Doug and Seth, but cocoa powder turns out to be rather tricky stuff, chemically speaking. First, because it’s a fermented product, it’s acidic. So one must correct for that by adding an alkaline, otherwise the acidity would undermine the structure of the cake and make it softer (we especially don’t want that with the high ratio cake we have gong here, because one of the virtues of high ratio cake is it’s firmness).

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Speaking of small appliances…

I remember back when I got my first restaurant cooking job. I was sixteen and needed a second job to pay for a gold watch for my then-girlfriend’s birthday present. What was I thinking???

Anyway I remember walking into the back and looking for all the small appliances and cool gizmos that I associated with cooking. The early eighties were the heyday of Presto Hot Doggers and Ronco inside-the-egg scramblers, and I expected to see a lot of that stuff laying around in a professional kitchen.

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High Ratio Chocolate Cake Recipe

As with the high ratio yellow cake recipe, emulsification is king here. The recipe is built accordingly, making a process allowance for the cocoa powder. An interesting feature of cocoa powder is that it delivers double the chocolate flavor if you combine it with boiling milk or water before you add it to your mix (another trick from the world of box cake formulators). Since I can’t abide wasting perfectly good chocolate flavor, I’ll be doing that.

I should add that this cake can be made with butter if you wish. As it is it won’t be exactly like a commercial cake because most of us don’t have access to emulsified shortening or high ratio flour, which are usually used to make high ratio cakes. But butter will work here. For more moisture you can substitute oil for some of the fat (olive oil is best since it also adds emulsifiers and tightens the crumb. This recipe will make one 11″ x 14″ x 2″ sheet cake or three 8″ round layers.

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High Ratio Yellow Cake Recipe

The name of the game in high ratio cake recipes is “emulsification”, which means an extremely smooth and integrated mixture with all the ingredients distributed as finely and uniformly as possible. That’s how the very fine and strong crumb of a commercially made cake layer is achieved. Most people don’t have access to the high ratio flour and emulsified shortening that commercial bakeries use, so I’m adding adding extra emulsifiers in the form of egg yolks. What are emulsifiers? Simply little whatsit molecules that get between other molecules and keep them from forming big clumps. A key to this is making sure all your ingredients are room temperature, since egg yolk emulsifiers don’t work well when they’re cold.

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Buying That New Mixer

Reader Chana, a reader and prolific baker, has finally worn out her KitchenAid and is in the market for a new machine. I receive requests for mixer recommendations regularly, but haven’t written on the subject for quite some time. It’s time to update!

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Next Up: High Ratio Cake

So many readers have asked for Joe-tweaked high ratio cake recipes that, well…what can I say? I need to give the people what they want. I’ll do a yellow and a chocolate since there have been tons of requests for both. That kringle really is vanishing in the rear view mirror. Oh well, I tried. […]

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Tell Me About Cake Mixes

Who knew there was so much interest in high ratio cakes and box cake mixes? Reader Pete wants to know if store bought cake mixes contain high ratio flour, and while I’m on the subject, would I mind telling him how box cake mixes work? Pete, I’ll do my best.

As far as I know most box cakes contain high ratio flour, for reasons that I outlined below. It delivers cake layers with an even crumb that rise high, yet are still moist and flavorful. As for how a cake mix works, that’s an interesting subject.

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