What Flour Do You Use For Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake?

Asked by Kimberly12. Answered on 14th March 2022

Full question

The Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake is absolutely wonderful. I'm looking for a little more fluff in my cake and wondering about the flour you use and if I need to use one with less protein (I use all-purpose). What protein % is the flour you use? And why don't you have salt in the recipe?

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake

By Nigella

Our answer

Nigella's Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake (from COOK, EAT, REPEAT) has a tender chocolate sponge with a rich, creamy peanut butter frosting. Nigella makes the cake with UK plain flour, that has a protein content of around 12%. This should be fairly comparable to most US all-purpose flours. Adding salt is very much subject to personal taste and you can add salt to the cake batter if you prefer.

In the US you can get low protein cake flour and you could use this to make a more tender sponge (though if you are making thin layers they may be more difficult to move about and stack). However, this would not necessarily add more "fluff" to the cake as the cake is made using a melt and mix method. This means that the fat is melted and stirred in with other ingredients, rather than being creamed with sugar before the other ingredients are added, which would add more air. As the cake batter is quite liquid, this will also limit the amount of fluffiness in the sponge cake, though it does give a moist, tender and very chocolatey sponge.