What order should you add the ingredients to bake a cake?

Recipes often call for a certain sequence, which might make amateur bakers worried about messing things.

You’re baking a cake and halfway through the preparation realize you added the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, when the recipe specifically asked for the opposite: “In the bowl of an electric mixer, combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt… In a separate dish, whisk together the oil, eggs, and vanilla extract. Slowly add the wet components to the dry ingredients while mixing on low speed.” Oops. But does it actually make a difference? Is this a blunder worthy of starting again, or can you comfortably proceed?

Although mixing the dry and wet components separately and then combining is important, it turns out that the sequence in which they’re combined together — wet into dry, or dry into wet — doesn’t matter much, except for cleaning.

The reason why wet and dry materials are often mixed separately before being combined has everything to do with equally distributing substances. Without following this initial step, it’s fairly easy to get batter that has unappetizing concentrations of salt or slightly metallic-tasting baking soda, or egg whites and yolks that are still separated, and will behave differently in the oven.

Yet, there is much disagreement on the appropriate sequence of combining. Some say that adding dry into wet leads to clumps of dry ingredients floating in the batter, while others say that actually the opposite, adding wet to dry, leads to, well, clumps.

The verdict seems to be still out, and everyone despises clumps. Yet one thing is certain: it is far more difficult to precisely combine dry and moist materials. That order tends to lead to a giant puff of flour wafting toward the ceiling, and settling all over the counters, while a steady, viscous stream of wet ingredients will instead narrowly ribbon its way down into the bowl containing dry ingredients, and nowhere else.

When in doubt, you should usually abide by the combining orders of the recipe you’re following because the author may have a specific reason for writing it that way, whether or not the reasoning is clear to you. So don’t give up if you end up doing it the incorrect way. Your cake will still rise, your cookies will still go well with a glass of milk, and your pancakes will still be a lovely morning treat.