The traditional ‘Hot Milk Cake’ is a light & fluffy vanilla cake; its texture lies somewhere between a butter cake and a pound cake. It is an absolute favourite in my home!

If you read the Wikipedia page (yes it has one!) it says – Hot milk cake gets its distinctive flavour from the scalded milk that is the liquid component of the batter. It differs from traditional sponge cakes in that it does contain baking powder as leavening, and the eggs are beaten together whole instead of whipping the yolks and whites separately. 

Sounds interesting, isn’t it? Simple ingredients, simple procedure, and is best served plain in all its buttery glory 🙂

Following my yesterday’s post of hot milk cake, I found another recipe on the internet and tweaked it a little – reduced the butter & sugar. The result is quite the same! It has the same texture and lightness and sweetness, and it being a tad bit healthier is a welcome side effect 😉 Definitely a win!

Another motivation today is my early birthday gift from dear husband – a KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer! I wanted to inaugurate it with a recipe that’ll prove why a stand mixer is a blessing in the kitchen for a budding baker 🙂

Love the texture!

Ingredients –

250g (2 cups) All-Purpose Flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp Salt
255g whole eggs (5 large or 6 small), room temperature
300g (1 ½ cup) granulated white sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
240 ml (1 cup) Milk
100g (about 7 tbsp) unsalted butter, cubed

Procedure –

1. Preheat the oven to 160C/300F. Grease a bundt pan (or a large 13″ x 9″ pan or two 8″ pans) generously with butter and keep aside.
2. In a separate bowl, sift the flour, baking powder and salt and keep aside.

3. In the stand mixer with whisk attachment (or you can use a hand mixer), beat whole eggs for about 5-7 minutes till you reach the ribbon stage and it gets fluffy and double in volume. If using a hand mixer, it might take a little longer. THIS STEP IS THE MOST IMPORTANT to get good texture and rise.

4. Meanwhile, in parallel, heat the butter and milk together in a saucepan over low heat until the butter melts completely. Milk should be just about to boil but not boiling hot.

5. Keeping the mixer at low speed, gradually add the sugar and beat again for another 5 minutes. Add vanilla and mix well. The batter will almost be triple in volume by now.
6. Gradually add the flour mixture to the batter and mix them at low speed until just combined.
7. Pour in the hot milk-butter mixture into the batter and mix well till combined. Don’t overmix.
8. Pour it immediately into the greased pan. Tap the pan gently on the platform couple times to remove any large air bubbles (I missed this step and you can see the air pocket in my pictures 🙂 ). Bake it for 45-50 minutes till a skewer inserted comes out clean.

9. Remove from oven and let it cool inside the pan for about 10 minutes. Remove from pan and cool on a rack completely.

Notes –

1. You can use half of this recipe and bake in a 7″ or 8″ pan. Chill it to make layers for a birthday cake.
2. You can serve it plain, or dust some icing sugar on top, or even serve it with fruit & whipped cream.
3. Some flavour variations that I would love to try – add lemon zest to get lemon freshness; replace vanilla with almond extract and top it with slivered almonds; poke holes into the cake and soak it with coconut flavoured frosting.

This is the picture from my previous experiment – had more sugar and butter than this one, tasted good of course 🙂 –

A picture of the beautiful addition to Noopur’s Kitchen 🙂 –

Recipe adapted from tasteofhome website