What You Should Consider Before Using Bread Flour In Cake
A good cake-craving is hard to kick. Once you start imagining the smell of a warm, sugary bake wafting through your house, it's hard to think of anything else. When it comes down to it, it's hard to turn away a slice of cake, especially when you get to choose the icing, flavor, and filling. However, sometimes the ingredients can be an issue. What if you work yourself up to bake a cake just to realize that you're out of the boxed stuff? Fine, you can make it from scratch! What do you do, though, when you look and see that you're out of all-purpose flour?
If you need to make a cake, but only have bread flour, there are a few things you should consider first. One of the primary things to remember is that if you use bread flour to bake a cake, your dessert will come out of the oven with a rather bread-like texture, as opposed to the traditional fluffy consistency you're probably used to (via Baking How).
Flour isn't easily exchangeable
There's a reason why we call bread flour, "bread" flour, and it's because it has a higher amount of protein when compared to its all-purpose alternative. Bread needs more protein to create denser gluten strands, according to Bon Appétit. So, when it comes to light, fluffy bakes like cakes, which traditionally have a soft crumb, bread flour isn't the best replacement for all-purpose or cake flour, which should be a staple pantry item.
Using bread flour to replace all-purpose flour in a cake will form too much gluten in the batter and make your cake chewy. Cake is meant to be light in texture, so ideally, these two flours should not be swapped because they're essentially manufactured for two different purposes. If for some reason you want to try your luck at switching the two, Food to Impress says that you need to minimize activating the gluten in bread flour as much as possible. Stop mixing the batter as soon as your ingredients are combined, and then immediately put the cake in the oven to bake. This will give the gluten less time to activate and lessen the chance that your cake turns out with a loaf-like texture.