Is Cake Flour Really Better For Homemade Cakes?

As the saying goes: cooking is an art, baking is a science. While you should feel free to experiment and play around in the kitchen, when it comes to the sweet or savory treats in your oven, certain chemical reactions can only occur when you use the right ingredients in the right amounts at the right times. The success of a cake often comes down to granular details (pun intended), including the type of flour you use. 

There are a number of flours, each with a unique purpose, and the difference often comes down to their protein content and granularity. Some of the most common are all-purpose flour, which is the standard flour you're probably most familiar with, cake flour, and bread flour. Using bread flour versus all-purpose flour changes baked goods because bread flour has more protein (11% to 13%), which means it develops more gluten and results in baked goods with greater strength, elasticity, and chewiness. All-purpose flour (9% to 11% protein) falls in the middle of the spectrum, and cake flour (7% to 9% protein) is the least proteinaceous — a fancy word for "containing protein" which is why it's so useful for baking soft, tender cakes.

But is cake flour really necessary? Can you bake a delectable cake without it? According to Anna Gordon, founder and co-owner of The Good Batch bakery in Brooklyn, New York, the answer is yes. "Most cakes can withstand a normal flour," she says.

Certain types of cakes are greatly improved by using the lower-protein flour. "I find that cake flour is ideal when you want a fluffy, delicate crumb texture like an angel food cake or chiffon," says Gordon. The light, airy texture of chiffon and angel food cakes is achieved by whipping air into the eggs. A delicate sweet like angel food cake is so much easier to make with an extra ingredient known as cream of tartar, a stabilizer. But a low-protein flour is also useful to help you avoid building gluten during the folding stage. These especially fluffy cakes are the most obvious use for cake flour, but you can also use it to give many other baked goods, such as cookies, an extra-tender crumb.

If you decide to stick with the all-purpose flour already in your cupboard, it shouldn't affect the quality of most cakes too much, but it might give them a somewhat coarser or denser texture. But the best swap for cake flour in a pinch is actually really easy and uses something you probably already have in your pantry. For every cup of flour, swap two tablespoons of cornstarch for the same amount of flour. (If you're measuring by weight, remove 15 grams of flour and add 16 grams of cornstarch.)

If you go the extra mile and pick up cake flour, Gordon has one more tip. "I recommend sifting cake flour before using it, because it can really clump up," she says.