The Best Vanilla Cake

This recipe is great for a number of reasons. Number one, it's an adaption of a great recipe by Cake Boss's star and baker Buddy Valastro. Second, while sometimes a vanilla cake can be dry or flavorless, this one is incredibly moist and oozing with flavor. Third, this is more of a baseline recipe that can be easily altered for different flavored cakes (i.e. the addition of chocolate, or almond extract, rum, etc.) Finally, and arguably most importantly, this recipe shows that you can have a spectacular cake that is completely dairy free.

2 1/2 cups cake flour
2 cups granulated sugar
2 cups silk live vanilla yogurt (this is important)
3/4 cup vegetable oil
2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 eggs (room temperature)
1 cup soymilk

Butter and flour 2 9" cake pans and insert parchment rounds that are buttered and floured to make removing your cakes a simple task. Preheat the oven to 350 and this is important. Do not think about placing these cakes in the oven as soon as it beeps. Your oven may say it's preheated but truth be told, it is almost certainly not at the right temperature and placing your cake in an under heated oven can ruin a baked good. I suggest you get an oven thermometer and not insert your cakes until it reads 350, however, if you don't want to do this you should simply preheat and wait at least 15 minutes after it beeps to place the cakes in.

I suggest you leave the yogurt and soymilk out for an hour or so before assembling to bring them closer to room temperature.

In the mixing bowl of a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, place in the cake flour, sugar, yogurt, vegetable oil, baking powder, vanilla, and salt in the standing mixer and mix on slow just until the ingredients are mixed in (a few seconds). Then increase the speed to low-medium and mix for a minute until the mixture is smooth.

With the motor on, mix in 1 egg at a time adding the next egg in as soon as the previous has been absorbed. Stop the motor periodically to scrape the sides and bottom with a rubber spatula.

Then with the motor running, add the soymilk 1/2 cup at a time, stopping after each addition to scrape the batter. Mix for a final minute or so to make sure everything is thoroughly mixed (however make sure you are not mixing on high speeds).

Now here is the tricky part of this recipe (but absolutely worth the extra step). To keep these cakes from crowning, the batter needs to be between 70 and 73 degrees (or if your house is a bit colder like mine is, you want the batter to register at room temperature). To test this, plunge the thermometer in the middle of the batter and if it's too cold, leave on the counter for a few minutes and if it's too warm, let cool in refrigerator for a few minutes.

Evenly distribute the batter between the two pans and bake for 25-30 minutes (I can almost guarantee that it will take at least 28 minutes but you should check the cakes at 25 minutes). You can insert a toothpick into the cake to see if it comes out clean but I'm not a huge fan of doing this. The tops of the cakes will be slightly springy and it should be a little golden on top when the cakes are done.

Rest the cakes in the pan for about 30 minutes and then invert them onto a cooling rack and remove the parchment paper and let the cakes completely cool. Here's the cool thing that I learned from Mr. Cake Boss - freezing cakes. Once the cake comes to room temperature, placing the cake in the freezer for an hour or two is important for a few reasons. First of all, by freezing the cakes they will be much easier to level and divide into layers (just make sure you don't freeze them into rocks because that's very dangerous as your knife may attack you after bouncing off the boulder you call a cake). The other cool aspect (forgive the pun) of freezing the cake is that unlike refrigerating a cake which leeches out moisture, freezing the cake locks the moisture in.