The Mistake That Will Instantly Ruin Your Fluffy Baked Goods

Some baked goods like pound cakes, cheesecakes, and fudgy brownies are meant to be dense, but others — angel food cakes, sponge cakes, and muffins — are meant to be fluffy. There's one sure-fire way to ruin your muffins and cakes, and that's by beating them into submission. Danielle Sepsy, who runs a New York-based bakery called The Hungry Gnome and wrote the cookbook, "The Scone Queen Bakes," told The Takeout, "I believe cookie dough, cake, and muffin batters are really easy to over-mix, especially because most people these days use a stand mixer or electric hand beaters."

Mixing in the dry ingredients by hand is one way to avoid the problem, as is a baking technique for cake batter called reverse creaming. This technique involves mixing butter with dry ingredients before adding the wet ones. If you must use an electric mixer, Sepsy advises, "... be sure to mix the dry ingredients in just until you don't see large streaks of flour; anything more and the gluten will develop further, and you will be left with a dense, dry, or gummy end result." She also pointed out that the dough for biscuits, pies, and scones needs to have small chunks of cold butter dispersed throughout to bake up nice and flaky. "The heat of your hands or your mixer or food processor overworking the dough will cause the pieces of butter in the dough to melt, and your final product will be less than favorable," she cautioned.

Over-mixing isn't the only way to end up with cookies and cakes that are more flat than fluffy. Over-baking is also an issue, since, as Danielle Sepsy explained, "If you want soft, chewy cookies or moist, fluffy muffins or cakes, they should be baked just until set — or even a minute or two less — always considering that the hot pan will continue to cook them when they are taken out of the oven." (Those oversized Crumbl cookies always seem to be underbaked, which causes squishy-soft interiors.)

Not measuring the ingredients properly can also be detrimental to baked goods. "If you aren't baking with a scale, be sure to spoon and level dry ingredients and properly level them off with an offset spatula," Sepsy says. (The flat side of a knife can also work if this type of spatula is not in your kitchen arsenal.) Measuring also depends on the type of the ingredient, since, as she points out, "Dry ingredients like flour shouldn't be packed into the measuring cups, but brown sugar should be." Finally, don't skimp on any leavening agents like baking powder or baking soda, since these quite literally do the heavy lifting when it comes to getting baked goods to rise.