About Buttermilk plus A Food Processor Snackin' Cake Recipe
Before Hawaii: a story and Recipe from The Baking Wizard!
Can a Substitute be Used for Buttermilk?
Light-textured buttermilk spice cake is delicious any time of day. Buttermilk is a classic dairy product that has been used for hundreds of years in American recipes, both in baking and as a marinade. There really is no substitute for buttermilk's flavor and texture. Cultured buttermilk, the kind we buy today, is thick and tangy and readily available. Please do not substitute regular milk mixed with a little lemon juice or vinegar. The harshness of the acid will dominate, and the texture of the cake is apt to be gummy instead of light and fluffy. Stella Parks has written about buttermilk and buttermilk substitutes in detail here. It's a great read. The only substitute she found that works is plain kefir. Keep in mind that buttermilk keeps a long time in the fridge, often way past the expiration date. Be sure to shake the container well before measuring. Of course, there will be bubbles, so to be sure you're getting 1 cup of buttermilk, it's best to weigh it. One cup buttermilk = 240 grams. My recipe calls for cake flour, and there is no substitute for it. Softasilk and Swans Down are two dependable national brands. Please do not mix all-purpose flour with cornstarch and use that instead of cake flour. It simply won't work. Cake flour, low in protein, is always bleached. It's treated with a small amount of chlorine gas that changes the structure of the flour and changes the gas itself. Again, please read Stella Parks on this subject. She packs in a lot of easily-understood science.
A food processor is great at making cakes
About this cake. I developed the recipe 35 years ago for my food processor cookbook, Patently Easy Food Processor Cooking, published in 1985 by the Cuisinart Cooking Club, Inc. The food processor method for making cakes seems counter intuitive. Instead of the traditional mixer method of "creaming" the butter with the sugar and then beating in the eggs and flavoring, followed by alternating additions of the buttermilk and dry ingredients, the food processor way asks you to process the sugar with the eggs first, followed by whizzing in the flavoring, butter, and buttermilk and finally pulsing in the dry ingredients. This method of making a cake batter takes just 2 to 3 minutes, and you'll wind up with a sensational light-textured cake with a fine crumb. The late Abby Mandel came up with this method, and it works like a charm.