FrekeChild
Super_Ideal_Rock
- Joined
- Dec 14, 2007
- Messages
- 19,456
Hmmm...well when I'm making baked goods for other people's consumption I always use whatever flour is most appropriate. This is kind of a random tangent about flour...For cupcakes, cakes and most cookies I will use cake flour-because it has the lowest amount of protein and it takes a lot of work to build up gluten. Pastry flour (which is usually pretty hard to find-at least where I'm at) is about middle of the road between cake flour and bread flour. So the closest to P flour is AP flour-because AP is a mix of cake and bread flours. I'll use pastry flour to make stuff like puff pastry, pie dough, etc. Bread flour has a high protein content which makes it desirable for bread...There is a long complicated explanation about wheat grains including stuff like: white and red, hard and soft, winter and spring and what wheat grains can make the different flours. Honestly, it's never been something that I've really concerned myself with--more of a bread maker's thing.
And for my own baked goods- I'll use whole wheat flour, unless I need more lift in the product than it can give me. Here's a link that explains a little about whole wheat flour. I just use it because it really doesn't make a huge difference in the end product if you use it in conjunction with AP or whatever other flour, and it's a heck of a lot healthier.
So Mara, I don't understand why they're trying to get you to use AP flour in the first place. What I would do to alter the recipe is this: use a cup and a half of cake flour, up the baking powder to 2 teaspoons, and see how that turns out. If it's still not as fluffy and moist as you were wanting, then perhaps adding a egg would help. Or an egg white or the yolk.
1 tablespoon=3 teaspoons
1 tablespoon=1/2 an ounce (only of water, eggs and a couple of other things.)
An adaptation that I always have to do is up the liquid level in the recipe because it's SO DANG DRY here in NM. So you might try adding a couple of teaspoons more of the buttermilk and see if that does anything for you to make it more moist.
Most of the time I'll try to make things a bit healthier by not using hydrogenated fats, instead using butter (which should always have AT LEAST 80% fat--European butter should run higher than that), instead of vegetable oil, using olive oil, using whole wheat instead of white flour, but one thing I almost always do for a cake is use either half and half or whole cream (40% fat) instead of milk. It's so bad, but it makes everything SO GOOD.
So maybe instead of just the buttermilk, whisk in some yogurt or sour cream just to give it that extra somethin' somethin' (my old Chef used to say that all the time when she'd add something extra-usually liqueur-to a recipe). But really it should add some extra moisture and flavor for sure.
ETA: I usually only have AP flour (and whole wheat) lying around because it's the easiest to get around here but I think it's a little bit of a waste in a lot of ways if you have bread flour lying around. It's way too easy to just grab a 1/2 cup of cake and 1/2 cup of bread and make your own 1 cup of AP, but that is only if you have both around. Having said that, I think having AP flour around is a heck of a lot easier than dealing with having to find pastry flour. Oy. I could go on and on about flour and other baking stuff for HOURS. This is why my posts are always super long...
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