I don't get it. Do they have some chemical leaveners in them or something?
I just had a slice tonight and upon complementing the chef on its lightness, was told it was a packet mix—just add egg and water.
Cake – How do packet cake mixes get their lightness without creaming butter and sugar
buttercakesugar
Related Topic
- Baking – Properly melting butter and sugar together for butterscotch bar recipe
- Cake – the difference between regular (vege. oil) and butter recipe cake mixes
- Cake – How to turn a brownie mix into a cake
- Butter cake creaming method
- Baking – Why add baking powder when creaming sugar and butter
- Cake – Japanese Cotton Sponge Cake – How to stop collapsing
Best Answer
Making a cake before around 1910 always required at least an hour of work beating sugar into butter: this incorporated air bubbles into the mixture. But since then, there have been a number of remarkable changes to the process.
The first was the arrival of modern cake shortening, which has smaller fat crystals that trap small air bubbles, which stay in the batter. They also have a much wider temperature range at which it has the right solidity, and these days manufacturers fill shortening with preformed bubbles of nitrogen (around 10% of the volume) and up to 3% of the shortening weight is replaced by bubble-stabilizing emulsifiers.
The second major innovation was the arrival of cake flour: a soft flour low in gluten that is very finely milled; in the US it is strongly bleached with chlorine, which also lightens the end result by various means, but the EU and UK disallow the bleaching step, so manufacturers there use different processes such as heat treatment.
These two improvements, together of course with mechanical mixers, have lead to not only less work when making cakes but also lighter, more fluffy end results, and the ability to use more sugar without the batter becoming to heavy.
Finally, because the mixing process fills the batter with bubbles, cake recipes typically either for no chemical leavening or for less than other batter recipes do.
(All of this information is extracted from pages 555-557 of the excellent On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee.)
So the answer to your question seems to be: mass-produced cake mixes use the incredible advances in food technology of the twentieth century in general, not so much chemical leavening specifically.