The Creaming Method

I’ve been creaming together butter and sugar since I was old enough to scamper onto the kitchen countertop and reach into the highest cupboard where my mother hid her stash of illicit sugar that was meant for holiday baking only. Now, most recipes that call for creaming butter and sugar together just start with that procedure and then move on to include eggs and dry ingredients, and most often require the use of a stand mixer or a hand mixer. When I was a kid, I started and stopped with the sugar and butter and I did it by hand. And then I ate it with a spoon, really fast, because if my mother came home and caught me, there’d be hell to pay. But for a child born with a deep kinship with sugar and butter, growing up in a vegan, no-sugar household required such hijinks for said child to survive.

Because I was combining the sugar and butter together for the express purpose of inhaling the mixture, shall we say, “à la carte,” I wasn’t worried about suspending the two in a beautiful, creamy state of being that was optimal for creating beautiful cakes. I was just going for a decent mash-up. As I got older and discovered ways of accessing other ingredients and an oven (don’t ask), I was able to produce slightly more palatable treats to feed my sweet soul. I started with cookies, in which case mixing together the butter and sugar isn’t much more of an ordeal than what I’d already been accustomed to doing. Cookies don’t require anything lofty from sugar and butter, since most cookies don’t aspire to great heights. They are meant to be round (usually) and flat (almost exclusively).

A few years older still and I was on to cakes. I learned quickly that giving butter and sugar a cursory spin wasn’t going to cut it. The cakes weren’t as springy as I’d hoped. They were too dense and they were often riddled with molten pockets of crystallized sugar goo. It was then that I surmised that what “light and fluffy” meant was to get the mixture from what looked to be a very sad pile of damp sand into a state wholly different, as if I’d walked into the hair salon with my unruly mass of frizzy brown hair and exited in full Farrah Fawcett glory. Those kinds of transformations take a while. And so it is with creaming butter and sugar when you’re mixing them for a cake.

When you’re making a cookie or a traditional muffin recipe, dense is okay. You want something with a tight crumb structure and little lift. When you’re creaming the butter and sugar for those kinds of treats, you need just a little agitation so that the air pockets you’re creating during mixing are small and the leavening you’ve added to the recipe won’t expand the batter too much beyond that little pocket. That wet, grainy look works for cookies.

When you’re creaming butter and sugar for a cake, however, you want those pockets big so that the leavening can really do its job and expand those air pockets with all that lovely carbon dioxide. For that expansion to happen, you need your ingredients to be willing and able to perform. Sugar can just show up. Regular old granulated sugar is just fine. The butter, however, has to do some prep work. It must be at room temperature. This can take anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours, depending on how cool or warm your room is. You want to be able to easily make a dent in the butter with your finger. However, you don’t want it melted. The sugar’s job is to essentially punch holes in the butter as it’s mixing. If the butter’s too cold, the sugar can’t make much of a dent. The mixture will stay in that sad, damp sand state. If it’s melted, there’s nothing really there for the sugar to punch. It’s like getting into a fistfight with pudding. On the other hand, a room-temperature butter will give the sugar something to work with, punching holes and dancing around the bowl, creating big bubbles and really expanding into a light and fluffy mess.

I find that if my butter’s right on the money, temperature-wise, it takes three to four minutes to get to optimal light and fluffy. If my room temperature is just a little chilly, such as in the dead of winter, it can take quite a bit longer. Sometimes five minutes longer. But that extra time is crucial and definitely worth it if you want that perfectly moist and bouncy cake that’s also perfect for stacking high. This is the cake that’s born to be in a wedding cake. Creamed cakes are usually structurally sound enough to act as the foundational base in the tallest celebratory tiered wonder.