The way you mix a cake—which ingredients go first, which ingredients you mix together first before adding to the main bowl, if you separate the eggs, when you add the eggs, when you should be especially careful not to overbeat, what you fold in versus beat in versus stir in, how if or when you sift ingredients—largely determines the texture of a cake. Naturally, the amount of leaveners also plays a large role in the process, but one’s mixing method can make or break the cake.
It’s kind of scary, how scientific the whole process is. The permutations are endless, and each small change could make a world of difference. I’m going to use this page as a place to collate mixing methods and learn what’s right for me.
1) Rose Cake V recipe (see Future Cakes) has you fluff the sugar in TWO batches: you cream some of the sugar with the butter; you whip the rest of the sugar with the egg whites. So, I would assume that you get tons of volume with the batter using this technique, and I’m excited about trying it.
2) Bee Lian’s Orange Cake recipe (see Tiffany Cake) has you fold in whipped whites as the last step: THE CHIFFON METHOD. It resulted not necessarily in a fluffy cake, but in a very moist, tender cake. Very nice. The Rose cake recipe I adapted also added in foamed whites at the end, yielding a nicely rising cake with a moist, tender crumb that I loved the feel of. Three cheers for adding whipped egg whites last of all!
3) The two major schools of mixing, the creaming method and the two-step method, have drastically different results: the creaming method (butter and sugar creamed for 5 minutes at the beginning) results in a fluffy, tall, light cake, while the two-step method (using alternations of wet and dry ingredients) results in a tender, moist, even cake.