Cooking Times

[bradleyo]

I've just finished making a chiffon cake and have a question. The recipe calls for cake flour, which I didn't have, so I used all-purpose. I suspect it probably won't give me as nice a crumb, but the cake did rise quite nicely. Anyway, the recipe says to bake at 325 for about 1 hour. Mine was done at 40 minutes. My oven is the correct temperature since I use a calibrated thermometer.

My question is, does all-purpose flour generally tend to cook faster than cake flour? Or was this just an exception due to some other factor, such as humidity?

[angrychef]

I wouldn't know about humidity. But what I do know is that cake flour is more acidic than other flours due to the bleaching and chlorination. The acidity of the cake batter will cause the structure to set faster and reducing baking time. Other factors that would affect baking time would be type of oven, oven temp., having all cake ingredients at room temp. as opposed to cold eggs/liquids, altitude. Maybe humidity---I'd be interested to find out....

I usually use the baking time given in recipes as a ballpark figure, never a given.