So I'm an experienced cook, but a novice baker and recently made an Easter cake that turned out nice, and I’m now attempting to follow a new recipe for a friend's birthday.
The problem I'm running into is that the cake batter generated by both recipes wasn't nearly enough to fill three cake pans (first was 6-inch, the second 8-inch) as descibed in the recipes. With the Easter cake, seeing how little batter there was, I doubled the recipe and made four layers as opposed to the three described in the recipe. For the lemon cake, I bought all new ingredients to ensure that the baking soda/powder was new and did a test run to see how much volume I could get in each pan.
Same result.
The cake tastes great and is wonderfully moist, but it's barely rising. The 8-inch cake pans are about 2 in. in height, and after filling two of them halfway, the resulting layers are just a little over an inch in height.
For my friend's test cake, I followed the recipe *exactly*:
- butter was left out for 3 days to soften
- eggs & milk were also room temperature
- bought new flour, baking soda & powder
- used an oven thermometer to ensure baking temperature was correct
I mixed the butter and sugar together in a Kitchen Aid mixer until it was light and fluffy, then added dry ingredients/milk/eggs etc and let it go for a minute more to get everything folded in. As before, there's not enough batter for an entire cake... I'll probably need to triple it to have enough for three fullsize layers.
Anyone have an idea where I've gone wrong?