the best vanilla cake recipe moist vanilla cake slathered with italian meringue buttercream.

This Vanilla Cake Recipe is a Building Block Recipe. Building Blocks are tried-and-true recipes that I find myself coming back to time and time again, sometimes to make them exactly as is, and sometimes as a starting point for something new. -> More Building Block Recipes.

My next door neighbor of 11 years is a cake decorator extraordinaire. For about a year, we actually worked as cake decorators together, which was a blast. We’ve both moved on to do other things over the past decade, and while I retired from wedding cakes years ago, she still decorates wedding cakes on the side.

This past Saturday, the two of us went out for a leisurely creole breakfast. We bitched and gossiped over biscuits and gravy, shrimp and grits, beignets and fresh squeezed orange juice. We also talked about cake. She’s doing a wedding cake this weekend for a bride that is very, umm… shall we say, particular? She is also welcoming a foreign exchange student to her house this week, and hosting out of town guests because her oldest daughter is graduating from high school this weekend. She doesn’t plan to sleep from Wednesday until Monday.

I offered to help by baking the cakes. Which sounds like a very generous, neighborly thing to do. In reality, my offer was a wee-bit selfish. We are currently experiencing a remarkably rainy spring here in Colorado. I’m talking rain every day. Every. Single. Day. For weeks. Staying inside and baking cakes (baking anything, really) is all I want to do in weather like that. Well, besides reading and sleeping.

Ingredients

• 3 whole eggs, separated
• 4 egg whites
• ¾ cup butter, softened
• ¾ cup shortening
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 cups cake flour (To make cake flour, replace 2 tbsp of flour with cornstarch per cup. So, for this recipe, add all the flour to a bowl, remove 6 tbsp and then add 6 tbsp of cornstarch. Whisk well to combine.)
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• ¼ tsp nutmeg (optional)
• ½ cup whole milk
• ½ cup buttermilk
• 3 tsp pure vanilla extract
• ½ tsp lemon extract (optional)

Instructions

1. Heat oven to 350. Grease and flour three or four 8 or 9 inch round cake pans and line the bottoms with a round of parchment paper that is also slathered with a bit of butter or shortening.
2. Separate the whole eggs, placing the yolks in a small bowl and the whites in the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Add the 4 additional egg whites for a total of 7 egg whites. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form when you lift the whisk from the beaten egg whites. Scrape the egg whites into another bowl. Rinse and dry the standing mixer bowl.
3. .............................................

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