How To Beat Butter For Cake

Inspired past conversations on the Food52 Hotline, we're sharing tips and tricks that brand navigating all of our kitchens easier and more fun.

Today: How to foam butter and sugar the old fashioned style.

Forget, for a moment, the twenty-infinitesimal meals. Push button the no-bake desserts out of your listen. Ask the 5-minute lunches to take a walk, just for a minute.

Sometimes we want to be romantic about cooking, to do things with our own ii hands. To practice our non-appliance-wielding grandmothers proud. When we do, we're going to have to know how to live without the mixers and the beaters of the world. (And, okay, sometimes y'all only don't have a mixer nearby—thanks, Airbnb kitchen.)

Later you read this mail, you'll be able to foam butter and saccharide without annihilation merely a bowl, a wooden spoon, and a fork. Dessert'south likely going to accept you a little bit longer. Your arms are going to be a little more than tired. But you're going to let appliances steal none of the glory, and y'all'll be rewarded well: with cookies, quick breads, cakes—that you've fabricated with your own two hands. Which sounds similar an occasion worth celebrating with another cookie...

How to Cream Butter and Sugar from Food52

Step one: Soften your butter.
This, of course, is a easily-off procedure, but if you desire the best results, information technology does crave a spry listen, or at to the lowest degree a functioning Google calendar. Friends, you must remember to take your butter out of the fridge or the freezer.

If it'due south in the fridge, take it out nearly 2 hours before you program on using it, depending on how warm your resident counter is. If it's holing up in the freezer, motion it to the fridge two days beforehand, so follow the refrigerator protocol. Last-minute butter softeners, we direct yous to our customs'south wonderful solutions. And we urge you to remember adjacent time. Soft butter is your BFF when creaming by paw.

Step two: Combine the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon.
To go the process started off on the correct foot, make like you'd mix anything else together. This will prepare you up for success when you move on to step 3. You can outset with a wooden spoon, and brew the ingredients against ane another. If your butter isn't perfectly soft, you can get in there with your ii easily—working the saccharide into the butter will help it soften and combine.

How to Cream Butter and Sugar from Food52

Stride iii: Break out the fork.
This is the tool you'll use to faux-cream. Using the dorsum of a fork (choose one that is leggy with long tines), start chirapsia the butter and sugar together, in the same movement you'd employ to whisk your scrambled eggs. Go along at it—enlist a friend if you're not ambidextrous—until there are no longer whatsoever streaks of butter. You lot're looking for uniform, fluffy texture and a slightly lighter color. Depending on how much butter and sugar you have, this could take anywhere from 2 to five minutes.

Go on in mind that, unless you're somewhat of a body builder, you won't get the aforementioned lift (aka aeration) in your baked goods that you might with a stand up mixer. But does it actually thing? You lot've simply creamed butter and carbohydrate, apparatus-free. And that'due south going to taste pretty darn peachy.

How to Cream Butter and Sugar from Food52

Photos by James Ransom

Additional ideas from the editors:

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What's on your "to-bake" listing? Let us know in the comments!