Cake formulas by baker's percentage: sponge, butter, chiffon and shortcrust ratios

Bread bakers think in hydration; cake bakers think in balance. A cake formula still uses baker's percentage — flour is 100% and everything else is a percentage of it — but the interesting numbers are no longer water. They are sugar, fat and egg, and the whole craft is keeping the ingredients that build structure in balance with the ones that tenderise and moisten. Get the ratios right and you can predict how a batter will behave before it ever sees the oven.

Cakes use a modified baker's percentage

Keep flour at 100% and write sugar, fat, egg and liquid as percentages of the flour weight; the total formula percent then runs to 300-500% because so much is piled on top of the flour. For foam cakes the egg figure looks enormous — a genoise runs egg at ~167% of flour — because in a sponge the structure itself is egg, not flour. The figure below illustrates this baker's-percentage structure, and the six-formula comparison table follows.

The balance rules: structure vs tenderness

Every cake balances tougheners / structure-builders (flour and egg) against tenderisers (sugar, fat, egg yolk) and moisteners (liquid, and sugar, which is hygroscopic) — illustrated in the seesaw diagram below. Two rules read almost any formula:

• Lean / balanced cake: sugar ≤ flour and fat ≤ egg. The pound cake is the textbook case.
• High-ratio cake: sugar > flour (about 25% more, so ≥125%) and liquid ≥ sugar. That over-loaded batter only stands up with low-protein cake flour, extra liquid and an emulsifier .

Tip the seesaw too far toward tenderness and the cake sinks; too far toward structure and it bakes tough and dry (see the fault table). The single most important lever is the sugar-to-flour ratio.

The four cake families

Cakes sort by how they are aerated and what fat they carry (see the diagram and families table below):

1. Foam sponge (genoise): leavened by a whipped whole-egg foam, no chemical raising agent.
2. Creamed butter cake: leavened by creamed air, optionally helped by baking powder.
3. High-ratio cake: baking powder plus an emulsified fat, carrying sugar above flour.
4. Chiffon / oil foam: a meringue plus baking powder, with liquid oil for the fat.

A fifth job — shortcrust pastry — is the inverse problem: there you want to suppress structure (gluten) and keep the paste short.

Flour choice runs through all of them. Pound cake and genoise want a plain or soft, low-protein flour, never strong bread flour, or the crumb turns tough. High-ratio and chiffon cakes need a true low-protein cake flour — Domson's Top Flight is a heat-treated cake flour at 7.8-9.2% protein, exactly this job. The catalogue flour and fat for each card are listed among the products at the end of this article.

Genoise — the whole-egg foam sponge

The genoise is the foundation foam cake: structure comes entirely from a warm-whisked whole-egg foam. The classic ratio is one egg to 30 g sugar and 30 g flour, so sugar equals flour and egg runs ~167% of flour, with the rule that sugar should not exceed egg ÷ 1.25. A genoise au beurre folds ~28% melted butter in last for flavour and keeping. The formula card below (total ~396%, worked at 300 g flour) builds it; warm the eggs and sugar to ~43°C, whip to the ribbon stage, fold the flour, then the warm butter, and bake at ~175-180°C — shown in the ribbon-stage and crumb photos below. King Arthur's tested genoise (6 eggs + 1 yolk, 149 g sugar, 90 g flour + cornstarch, 57 g butter, 350°F) is the same idea with an even lighter flour load. Genoise is built dry on purpose — it is meant to drink syrup.

Creamed butter cake — pound cake and Victoria sponge

The most teachable balanced cake is the pound cake / quatre-quarts: equal weights of flour, sugar, butter and egg — 1:1:1:1, each at 100%. It satisfies the balance rules by definition (sugar = flour, fat = egg). Add ~3% baking powder, or use self-raising flour, and you have the lighter British Victoria sponge. The formula card below (total ~404%, worked at 1000 g flour) uses the creaming method: beat softened butter and sugar pale and fluffy — that is where the lift comes from — add the eggs gradually to hold the emulsion, then fold in the flour — shown in the creaming-method figure below. Bake a Victoria sponge at ~180-190°C for 20-25 minutes, sandwich it with jam and cream (pictured below), and keep the cream refrigerated. Butter here is Polmlek Unsalted Butter 82% (min 82% fat, ~16% water); production bakeries swap in cake margarine.

High-ratio cake — sugar above flour

The commercial bakery's layer cake carries more sugar than flour and more liquid than sugar, for a fine, very moist, long-keeping crumb. The worked formula card below follows Baking Sense's vanilla layer — flour 100, sugar 133, fat 116, egg 73, total liquid 133 — at a total of ~487%. That batter only holds because three things line up at once: low-protein cake flour, extra liquid, and an emulsified high-ratio shortening. Domson's High Ratio Vegetable Shortening carries a distilled-monoglyceride emulsifier (E471) and a 44°C slip point precisely so the fat disperses and binds the water. Mix it by the two-stage (blending) method — blend the dry ingredients, shortening and part of the liquid to a paste, then add the eggs and the rest of the liquid — and the batter pours — shown in the two-stage mixing figure below. Do not try it with butter and bread flour; it will collapse.

For a chocolate version of any butter or high-ratio cake, replace 10-25% of the flour with cocoa. Domson's Dark Dutch Cocoa GT78 is alkalised to pH 7.3-7.7, so it is pH-neutral and pairs with baking powder; a natural (acidic, pH 5-6) cocoa would instead pair with baking soda . Getting that pairing wrong is a classic cause of a flat, soapy-tasting chocolate cake.

Chiffon — the oil foam

Chiffon is the lightest cake that is still genuinely moist. It marries an oil-and-yolk batter with a stiff egg-white meringue, leavened by both the foam and baking powder. Because the fat is liquid oil, the crumb stays soft even straight from the fridge — chiffon's advantage over butter cakes, which firm up cold. The formula card below (total ~458%, worked at 200 g cake flour) uses the BAKERpedia midpoints: sugar 70%, oil 55%, yolk 55%, water 60%, whites 108%, baking powder 4.5%, cream of tartar 0.5%. Make the batter, whip the whites to a firm-but-not-dry peak, fold, and bake in an ungreased tube pan so the batter can climb; cool it upside-down so it does not collapse — shown in the process and slice photos below .

Shortcrust pastry — the short-paste family

Pastry inverts the cake problem: here you want to limit gluten so the crust eats short, not chewy. The formula card below is built on the King Arthur pâte sucrée (flour 100, butter ~63, sugar ~28, yolk ~10, water ~3; total ~205%, worked at 500 g flour) and blind-baked at 190°C. Its relatives shift the same three ingredients (see the diagram and short-paste table below):

• Pâte brisée (savoury): flour 100, butter 50-67, cold water 20-33, no sugar — flaky and sturdy for quiches and pies; the classic 3:2:1 flour:fat:water rule.
• Pâte sablée / shortbread: sugar:butter:flour = 1:2:3 (flour 100, butter 67, sugar 33) — the sandiest and most fragile.

Keep the water low and the butter cool, mix only to clumps, and rest the dough chilled, or the crust shrinks and toughens. Blind-bake with weights, then finish uncovered, and egg-wash the warm shell before a wet filling — pictured below.

Complete mixes — the production shortcut

When consistency matters more than from-scratch craft, a complete mix carries the flour, starch, sugar, raising agents and emulsifiers; the baker just adds egg, fat and/or water. The formula card below gives two first-party Zeelandia application recipes in baker's percentage against the mix: Sponge Mix Classic (mix 1000: egg 500: water 200; whisk 6-8 min; bake 180°C 30-40 min) and Sandia pound-cake mix (mix 1000: oil/margarine 460: egg 460; mix 4-5 min; bake 180°C 50 min). One catalogue caution: the product labelled "Butter Cake Mix" is actually a yeast-raised cake mix on its datasheet, not a creamed butter cake — a likely title mismatch.

Knowing when it is baked

Skewer tests are fine, but a thermometer is surer: most cakes are done at an internal 93-99°C (200-210°F) — sponges around 96-99°C, a dense pound cake right up to ~99°C. Because every batter here contains raw egg, baking fully to that range is also the food-safety control.

Buying the ingredients

Every card maps to catalogue products (see the products at the end of this article and the flour/fat selection table below): Domson Top Flight Cake Flour for sponge, high-ratio and chiffon; Domson Plain / Self-Raising Flour and Golden Jewel Pastry Flour for butter cakes and pastry; Kent Caster Sugar and Icing Sugar CP; Polmlek Unsalted Butter 82%, Ajax Cake Margarine, Cardowan High Ratio Vegetable Shortening and Olympic Sunflower Oil for the fats; Liquid Egg Eifix and Egg White Powder for egg; Baking Powder and JAR Dark Dutch Cocoa; and Zeelandia Sponge Mix Classic and Sandia for the complete-mix route.

Food-safety note: all the cakes here contain raw egg in the batter — bake to an internal 93-99°C; raw flour is not ready-to-eat and every flour/mix declares gluten; butter and cream/custard fillings are perishable dairy — keep refrigerated and within shelf life; the high-ratio layer cake uses 60% milk as a batter ingredient — milk is an allergen in that formula regardless of any filling; the almond pâte sucrée variant (RecipeTin) contains almond meal — tree nuts must be declared; the Zeelandia mixes carry wheat and milk and may contain rye, barley, oat, egg, soya and sesame ; Dutch cocoa GT78 pack-size allergen split: the 25 kg pack is gluten-free, but the 6×5 kg pack may contain gluten — both sizes carry a soya cross-contamination warning.