Everyone needs a reliable basic vanilla cake recipe. Birthday layer cakes, sheet cakes and cupcakes can be needed at any time and a fast and easy recipe can be a big time saver without resorting to a bakery or a box mix.

Most basic cake recipe call for the same ingredients and the same process of creaming together butter and sugar, then carefully alternating flour and milk until combined. The problem is, even though everyone loves the bragging rights that come from making a cake from scratch, everyone also loves the impossibly soft and fluffy cakes that come from a box or bakery (which also usually comes from a box). Why are the homemade cakes that we labor over always so dense and hard? The answer is butter.

While butter usually makes things better, butter is what actually makes cakes hard as the cool and/or are refrigerated, which if they must be if covered in buttercream or filled with mousse. Butter is solid when it is cold. One thing the box cake mix instructs is to add oil—not butter—to the mix. This is one of the the reason they stay so impossibly soft even straight out of the refrigerator.

Well if butter is the problem, why not just leave it out and enjoy a nice soft fluffy cake? Basically because, besides flavor and richness, creaming the butter and sugar together is also what forms and traps a million little air bubbles in your cake batter and gives it a beautiful rise and crumb.

So what if you want a lighter, fluffier cake, with great homemade flavor that stays soft even after refrigeration? What are you to do? My Easy Fluffy Vanilla Cake using my easy cake method is the answer.

I drastically reduced the butter in this cake and swapped in some neutral canola oil to add softness. The slight tang of “sour milk” made by adding apple cider vinegar to milk (or buttermilk if you have it) brings back the flavor we would usually get from the missing butter and adds lift by interacting with the baking soda. Buttermilk and baking soda would not be enough to lift this cake to the necessary fluffy heights and that’s where eggs come in.

There is a class of pastry called sponge cakes. Sponge cakes included the cloud like Angel Food and Chiffon cakes most people are familiar with. Sponge cakes contain very little butter or oil which is melted and mixed into the batter not creamed with the sugar. They get their incredible lift and fluffy texture from eggs—lots of eggs. Whipping together eggs and sugar forms an air filled foam or meringue that lifts these cakes to incredible heights.

For my Easy Fluffy Vanilla Cake I borrowed from the “foam method” used for sponge cakes to make a hybrid cake that has the familiar moisture and richness of a butter cake with some of the light fluffiness of a sponge cake. However while a sponge cake can use as many as seven eggs, my cake only needs two—a definite money saver if you need your eggs for more than just cake.

This cake also comes together a lot faster than a sponge cake. The hardest part is making the egg foam and that only takes 3 minutes. Once the egg foam is whipped you simply mix in the wet and then the dry ingredients and you are done! That’s why I call this my “Easy Cake Method”. I clocked myself at 9-10 minutes to get this cake in the oven after I had laid out all of my ingredients. It rises beautifully and evenly making it ideal for layered birthday cakes. The crumb is even and light and it won’t turn rock hard in the refrigerator. It will firm up a little but quickly returns to an ideal eating temperature and texture after a few minutes at room temperature.

If you secretly love box cake, but still want the bragging rights of a scratch made cake, FAST— try my Easy Fluffy Vanilla Cake! Watch a video demonstration of this cake recipe on my YouTube channel here!