10 Different Types of Cake

Home bakers and online kitchen tutors will prompt you to classify cakes according to the venue and flavoring like fruit cakes, chocolate cakes and so on. However, that’s not particularly helpful when you’re trying to understand how to make a cake the best way possible.

Professional bakers divide the cakes according to the mixing process and the ingredients. According to how the cake batter is prepared, we’ll help you recognize and distinguish from a basic list of different types of cake.

Butter Cake

It’s easy to bake this butter cake made using buttermilk-raspberry into a sheet cake, a DIY traditional ‘wedding breakfast’ cake or a layer cake. To recognize butter cakes, check the recipe for cake that contains cream, butter and sugar in the ingredients. You can add eggs after the creaming to aerate the batter a little along with some milk in order to give the batter some texture and baking powder to help it rise in the oven.

Inside the butter cake family, there are many types of cake batter that you can experiment with including white, marble, chocolate and yellow cakes. To use coloring with the white and yellow cakes, you’ll have to determine whether they have extra egg yolks in them for imparting the yellow color or they have egg whites in them for white cake.

Carrot Cake

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Carrot cake employs the leavening techniques used in butter cakes but using canola or vegetable oil and taking more time in the oven. Needless to say, it contains carrots mixed inside the batter with a white cream cheese frosting and other choice types of frostings.

Pound Cake

It’s important to know the basic ratio for making a pound cake. Once you’re through with that, there’s no stopping you. It may not be wrong to call pound cake a cousin of butter cakes. It takes its name from the balance of proportion in the ingredients like sugar, flour and eggs that each have a single-pound portion in the total tally.

Some recipes for pound cake may ask you to separate the eggs and whip the whites folded into the cake’s batter to leaven it while others may ask you to use other leavening agents like baking powder or baking soda, again bringing it into the world of butter cakes. These cakes are usually very light-flavored and topped quite simply using water icing or glaze. Coffee cakes, fruit crumb cakes and sour cream cakes all fall under the domain of Pound cake.

Red Velvet Cake

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The Red Velvet cake uses oil instead of butter. Its recipe contains cocoa in the batter to impart the signature red velvet flavor. It’s one of the most delicious renditions of cakes in the world by many standards.

It is one of the world’s most sought-after cakes and one of the very famous types of birthday cakes. Its red, red-brown or maroon texture gives it the characteristic color.

Genoise Cake

Genoise cake has layers of cake that are light enough to be topped with whipped cream and strawberries to make a delicious summer dessert.

Genoise is quite simply a reference towards sponge cakes in the French and Italian cultures. Its recipe contains whole eggs beaten with sugar to make them ribbony and viscous. After that, flour is added to it along with butter in some cases before proceeding to bake the batter.

It doesn’t create its own dominance on the flavor so that makes it a really good option for creating rolled or layered cakes with a less buttered, lighter texture. Flavor and moisture are added by moistening the layers of genoise cake with flavored syrups and stacked over each other on fillings like buttercream frosting.

Sponge Cake

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Sponge cakes are the easiest to recognize. All you have to do is to check a recipe that does not contain any baking powder or baking soda but has a lot of whipped eggs or egg whites for leavening. A recipe that follows this rule of thumb, it’s a sponge cake. There are many different sub classes and variants of sponge cake, which may have different names depending on where you are in the world.

Biscuit Cake

Biscuit cake is another sponge cake type that contains both the whites and yolks of egg. However, it's one main difference from Genoise cakes is that the egg whites and yolks get whipped separately first before being folded back together. This helps it retain shape better after mixing, creating batter that’s direr and lighter than genoise. The biscuit cake sometimes goes by the variation of the classic Passover sponge cake where potato starch and matzo cake meal replace flour in the batter.

Baked and Unbaked Flourless Cake

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Baked flourless cakes consist of flourless chocolate cakes and cheesecakes made using springform pans. Unbaked Flourless cakes on the other hand get unmolding after getting molded in a dessert ring. Before the mousse is added, unbaked flourless cakes have a bottom or crust layer.

Angel Food Cake

If you spot a cake recipe with whites-only eggs in the ingredients, it’s most probably an Angel Food Cake. Before folding the flour in, sugar-whipping makes the egg whites thicker, causing the cake to become delicate, airy and snowy-white in an appearance and flavor that compliments fruit beautifully. Angel Food cakes are quite high in sugar content, making them have a spongy or chewy outlook.

Chiffon Cake

The Chiffon Cake is a relatively early American invention brought forward by a salesman during the 1940s and 50s. He sold the recipe to General Mills, who spread it further using their reach.

The recipe involves vegetable oil and baking powder with separated eggs and whites beaten to soften up the peaks helping create a tender crumb and a rich, dense flavor. It’s more like a blend of an oil and a sponge cake because of the flavor richness and a tender crumb with a lighter texture.

Here are some delicious cake recipes

If you love the sweets check out our Best Desserts Around the World post.