I am Petra Cox with Mom's Apple Pie Company Bakery in Occoquan, Virginia and we're are making a chocolate cake today and to make a chocolate cake that has the right texture and the right density, you are going to need to know how to measure your dry ingredients properly.
In this case, we are using cake flour instead of all-purpose flour and for that you can just find that at the grocery store, most grocery stores carry cake flour or if you're going to use all-purpose flour if you can't find cake flour, just take off two tablespoons from this measure and you have the right density for your cake.
So we are doing two-and-a-half cups of flour. You want to make sure as you're measuring flour that it's placed loosely in the cup and then you're going to shave off the excess from the top. So, you're not going to have a really heavy cup of flour. This is a one-half cup measurement. We are going to do two-and-a-half cup, so it would be five of these, there is one. If the flour is packed into the measuring cup, you're going to have a lot more flour in your cake.
So there is one cup, two cups and two-and-a-half cups. So, you see it's nice and even on the top and it's just loosely packed in there. So that's your two-and-a-half cups. Then we're going to have together with this three cups of sugar. Sugar of course is a lot easier. You can just shake the top off and make sure that's pretty flat. So one, two, three, three cups of sugar and cocoa. This is unsweetened cocoa, so there is one-half cup.
Now I'll measure this, I know that there is a cup-and-a-half, but the important thing is to not overfill your cups and make them too heavy. The only time when this is not the case is when a recipe calls for something like brown sugar and it asks for you to pack the sugar in and that means you make sure that the sugar is in there and compact and really packed into the cup. A packed cup of sugar is going to be a lot more than the loose cup of brown sugar. So we have a cup-and-a-half of cocoa and two-and-a-half cups of cake flour and three cups of sugar, and the same thing goes for stuff like baking soda and baking powder. You're going to just need to make sure that it's even on the top.
So there is one and two teaspoons of baking soda. Baking powder containers usually have a handy little thing in there to shave off the top. So, there is one teaspoon of baking powder and we are going to need two spoons and a half of salt.
So salt is like sugar, it's pretty easy to make sure that it's leveled in there, so that you are not over or under measuring. So there we go. We've measured our dry ingredients the right way so we are not getting too much or too little of anything.
When you have too much flour, you get a heavier, denser cake that's not quite as flavorful. So, you want to make sure all the ingredients are sort of in balance with each other to make a nice, moist delicious chocolate cake.
So we've measured our dry ingredients and we're going to move on and make the batter.