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Fluffy Yellow Layer Cake  Recipe - America's Test Kitchen

Nonstick cooking spray can be used for greasing the pans (proceed with flouring as directed). Bring all ingredients to room temperature before beginning. Frost the cake with our Foolproof Chocolate Frosting (see related recipe) or your favorite topping.

Fluffy Yellow Layer Cake

Makes two 9-inch cake layers

It’s easy to create a supremely fluffy layer cake with additives, but most cakes made from entirely natural ingredients are either unpleasantly dense or too fragile to support layers of frosting.

We wanted a frosted yellow layer cake with an ethereal texture and the great flavor of natural ingredients.

Chiffon cakes are especially weightless, springy, and moist. But unlike butter cakes, they are too light to stand up to a serious slathering of frosting. We decided to blend the two types of cake. Adapting a chiffon technique (using a large quantity of whipped egg whites to get a high volume and light texture) to combine the ingredients from our butter cake recipe worked beautifully, creating a light, porous cake that was hefty enough to hold the frosting’s weight. But the cake lacked moistness and some tenderness. Using a combination of fats (10 tablespoons of butter plus 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil) kept the butter flavor intact while improving the moistness of the cake. For extra tenderness, we increased the sugar and substituted buttermilk for milk. The buttermilk not only introduced a new flavor dimension, but also allowed us to replace some of the baking powder with a little baking soda to ensure an even rise.

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