My favourite cake batter

Everyone has their own favourite batter for making cakes with and this is mine - I use it for cakes and cupcakes and adjust ingredients as needed for the different flavours I want. Since I make a lot of cakes I decided to put the basic recipe here and then refer to adjustments in the posts with my cakes. To convert my recipes to USA measuring standards I used this site: traditional oven Although they don't show it linked on their home page they do have some great converters that I found were accurate.

You can choose to either make this by hand, with a mixer or just in a kitchen machine.
For a 7" round cake tin or 12 cupcakes you need:

• 125 grams / 1 ¹/10  stick of butter of butter or margarine at room temperature
• 170 grams / 3/4 cup of sugar this can be castor sugar or demerara sugar etc.
• 2 large eggs
• 5 ml / 1 teaspoon of vanilla flavouring
• 35 - 60 ml / 2 - 4 tablespoons of milk
• 225 grams / 1 4/5 cup of self raising flour

Instructions to make by hand or using a mixer:

1. Preheat the oven to gas 4 / 350 F / 180 C
2. Prepare your cake tin by spraying it with baking spray, carefully covering the sides with butter or putting cupcake liners into the cupcake tin.
3. Put the butter in a mixing bowl and mix till creamy.
4. Add the sugar and mix well.
5. Add the eggs and mix well - if you did steps 1 and 2 correctly you will see little lumps of butter/sugar mix floating around - if not mix a bit more till it is smaller.
6. Add the vanilla flavouring and  half the milk and stir.
7. Add the flour and mix well - if it gets hard to mix add more milk.
8. Fill the cake tin/cupcake cases
9. If you are making a cake it will take about 55 minutes - if making cupcakes it will take about 35 minutes till baked - use a skewer or wooden toothpick to poke the cake down to the bottom and see if it's done - if it's clean when you pull it out it's done, if not give it 5 more minutes.
10. Leave it/them to cool a few minutes in the tin - then take it/them out and leave to cool on a cake rack (or just the counter top/plate if you don't have one)
11. Wait with icing till they are cold or it will get too messy

If you want to use a kitchen machine to make the batter do it like this:

1. Put the butter and sugar in the kitchen machine and mix till smooth.
2. Add the eggs and all liquids and mix.
3. Add the flour and mix for 5 minutes.
4. Continue with step 8 above.

Enjoy!