When it comes to baking, it’s important to keep certain ingredients at room temperature so that batters and doughs come together easily and achieve the right texture. According to Epicurious, the temperature of your eggs and butter “can make or break a cake.” In the article, Shauna Sever, author of Midwest Made: Big, Bold Baking from the Heartland explains that ingredient temperature is indispensable to building proper structure in cookies, cakes, and quick breads, and that utilizing room temp liquids, fats, and eggs is “the key in achieving a nice, velvety batter.”
This is particularly important when it comes to eggs. When making cookies or cake with the “creaming” method – beating butter and sugar until the mixture takes on air and the sugar’s crystals dissolve (via Encyclopedia Britannica) – adding cold eggs to the butter mixture can immediately curdle it. As Stella Parks, author of BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts tells Epicurious, “Curdled cake batters tend to rise poorly, so the finished cake will be rather dense.”
