Easy Cake Flour Substitute
No need to buy cake flour anymore. With this cake flour recipe, you can make a little, a lot; or just what you need for the recipe.
Offering many homemade baking substitutes, cake recipes from scratch and more below.
For every needed cup of cake flour, measure 1 cup of all-purpose flour and remove 2 tablespoons from that cup. Replace those 2 tablespoons of flour with 2 tablespoons of cornstarch.
An even easier alternate is to skip the cornstarch all together. So, 1 cup all-purpose flour minus 2 tablespoons = 1 cup of cake flour. This works just about as well.
Do I really need to sift my flour?
When I weigh flour for a recipe (which is 99.9% of the time), I don’t sift my all-purpose flour (unless the recipe says specifically to sift), but I do sift my cake flour. This is mostly because the soft texture of cake flour tends to clump up.
I do, though, always aerate my flour, regardless of type, by whisking for a few moments (usually with other dry ingredients) before incorporating it into any wet ingredients (either with a fork or whisk).
Since I am a big fan of Rose Levy Beranbaum’s (baker supreme and author of The Cake Bible, The Bread Bible, Rose’s Heavenly Cakes and more) reverse creaming method (starting with the dry ingredients in the mixer), I simply run the dry ingredients in the mixer for about 20-30 seconds before I add any of the other ingredients.
As Rose explains, if a recipe calls for “1 cup cake flour, sifted” then you would measure your cup of cake flour, and then you would sift it.
So if a recipe calls for “1 cup of sifted cake flour,” then you would set your cup (cup for dry measure) on your counter and sift the cake flour into your measuring cup until it mounds over, then level it off with knife.