Vanilla Spiced Snack Cake

This post has been sponsored by my friends at Rodelle, thank you for supporting the brands that support Olive and Artisan.

            Oh, it’s that time of the year, isn’t it? When we put on chunky tights and get melancholy. There’s something about October. It hits us like a ton of bricks. After a sunny 80 degree day, we wake up against foggy windows, and spiced candles with the urge to get in that kitchen and warm the house with a preheated oven.

            I’ve been baking snack cakes lately. Something about their size and ease that I love. When you can just cut a square and pick it up between your thumb and index finger. No real need for a plate, or an occasion for that matter. If you have kids, this is a great way to greet them at the door after school. If you’re watching the first scary movie night of the season, this is a perfect thing to have on the ottoman, perfectly in reach for everybody.

            This one has been a favorite. It’s a Vanilla Spiced Snack Cake. I tested it with on my stories a few weeks back on Instagram. The goal was to make a vanilla forward cake that’s soft and easy to hold. We always fail first, that’s the rhythm. But thankfully, I kept trying and this perfectly dense, yet light cake appeared. More spices than you think would be necessary for a cake of this size. Which I think is necessary when making a bite sized cake. All the vanilla and ginger and cloves flavors are packed forward. You miss nothing here, you won’t even miss the fork and plate.

            When making a cake like this it’s paramount the ingredients you use are always of the highest quality. From how they’re harvested to the quality you taste. Rodelle’s Fair Trade Vanilla extract hits all those check marks. With a vertical supply chain, Rodelle can work straight with the vanilla farmers to get them fair market price.

            This cake is made with part all-purpose flour and part cake flour so that you have a nice small crumb. Cake flour is not cake mix. It’s a flour that has a lower protein content than all purpose. Since it has less protein, it reduces the gluten production making the cake less chewy and more soft. Think about cutting into the center of a traditional cupcake and how it folds onto itself before you can make a clean cut. That’s because the gluten has made it stretchy and strong. For this cake, I wanted our teeth’s to sink into it without any bounce back.

            Another method that helps us get that consistency is using reverse creaming. Reverse creaming means that instead of creaming the butter and sugar together before adding the eggs and then alternating dry ingredients with the milk (the way we’re all used to), we’re going to mix the butter with the dry ingredients until it forms a sandy looking consistency. This helps reduce the amount of gluten production because it coats the dry ingredients giving the flour less time exposed to the wet ingredients. And the more time flour is exposed to moisture, the more time the gluten has to develop.

            And there you have it! The rest of the directions are down below in the recipe card. I hope you get a chance to try this one out. And head over to Rodelles websites and check out their full line of Fair Trade Vanilla.

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