What texture does the cake obtain when you beat certain ingredients before mixing others with it?

Sometimes the ingredients suggest starting off by beating


- the whole egg with sugar


- egg yolk


- egg white


- butter with sugar


etc.





Apparently, they don't seem to beat them all together. They just beat one and then just ';mix'; the other to it. What's the difference when you beat one ingredient before mixing other ingredients to it?





And what about the order of mixing ingredients? What happens when you mix this before that and all that stuff?





Thank you in advance.What texture does the cake obtain when you beat certain ingredients before mixing others with it?
Creaming the butter and sugar together first coats the sugar and spreads out the butter in your recipe so it makes pockets of air in your cake or cookie.





I have three Hershey's Chocolate cookbooks. In the oldest one, the cake recipes had me separate the yolks and the whites. The yolks were beaten into the butter and other ingredients. The whites were beaten separately and folded in at the end. This created a high, light, crumbly cake - kind of dry. In the last book, the recipes all said to beat the eggs with the whites and yolks together, into the butter, etc. This created a cake not as high, not as light but moister.





If you take the Toll House Cookie recipe on the back of the package of chocolate chips and follow the directions exactly, you get a crisp cookie. If you just toss everything into a bowl and mix it up, the entire texture of the cookie is different - chewier. By mixing the flour a lot in with the other ingredients, it releases the strands and causes a tougher result. By adding the flour mixture last (dry ingredients last), and doing only enough mixing to incorporate it, the item is lighter, moister and not tough.





It all has to do with chemical reactions to things. Same if you take the baking soda in a recipe and dump it in with the flour. You will get a totally different reaction in your cake if you dissolve the soda in milk or water off stewed raisins.





Same again with raisins in your cake or muffin. If you put them in dry, then they have a tendency to be hard when you bite them. If you stew them before putting them into your mix (puff them up with water), they will not only be soft but will add more flavor to your recipe.





Hope that helps.What texture does the cake obtain when you beat certain ingredients before mixing others with it?
The best example is to compare an Angel Food, chiffon or sponge cake to a regular batter cake. In the first 3, you'd beat the egg whites to peaks and then fold in the other ingredients. This creates a light, airy texture. In a regular batter cake, you beat all the ingredients, including the flour, and get a denser textured cake. If you cream the butter, and gradually add the sugar (or beat the egg yolks and gradually add the sugar), it helps the grains to get incorporated and not make a grainy texture to the batter. ... When you're making sweet breads, muffins or cookies, it doesn't usually matter the order you put stuff in, because those batters are coarser and lumpier and more forgiving:)