What Is the Difference Between Cake and Pastry?

Pastries and cakes. Whether homemade or purchased from a shop or bakery, variants of these sweet delights may be found in civilizations all across the world, indicating that our fondness for them is universal.

You are not alone if you have ever pondered what the difference between cakes and pastries is, considering that both satisfy our sugar needs and are manufactured from identical components.

Like with many other questions, the answer is dependent. The line between these two baked delights is not precisely defined, but there are several distinctions that may help us separate them.

Here’s a quick tip to tell your carrot cake from your croissants, and your palmiers from your pavlova.

A Problem of Definition

Like me, you probably have an idea in your brain of what a cake or pastry looks like but find it difficult to identify one. This is due to the diverse definitions of cake and pastry.

Pastry refers to both a kind of dough and specific baked goods prepared from that dough, while cake may refer to a wide variety of sweet treats.

It is advisable to compare them one at a time, starting with the sort of dough or batter and then moving on to the items themselves.

Dough and Batter

Pastry is a stiff dough generally comprised of flour, water, and lard. Some pastries have additional sugar, while others contain specialty fats and other additives.

At room temperature, the fat in most pastries is solid. The dough may be used as a basis, crust, or shell for different sweet or savory fillings such as pies, tarts, and pasties, depending on the kind of pastry.

Cake evolved from sweetened breads, therefore many traditional cakes have a porous structure that mimics that of bread.

Cake batter is often wetter than pastry batter, with the key components being flour, sugar, eggs, oil or soft butter, liquid (commonly milk), and a leavening agent.

Cake crumb is moist, soft, and supple, and it is often stacked, frosted, or otherwise topped with sweet toppings.

It’s All About the Flour

Although cake is more similar to bread than pastry, the flour used in it is considerably different. It all comes down to the quantity of protein in the flour, with pastry flour having greater amounts of protein (usually about 10-12%) and cake and biscuit flour having lower levels (often around 7.5-9%).

When flour is combined with water, this protein produces gluten strands, and too much gluten in a cake makes the crumb dry and harsh, rather than the desirable light and airy texture of a sponge or chiffon cake.

The eggs in cake provide the protein structure that allows it to rise by collecting the gases released by the leavening ingredient.

The chemistry of some pastries is highly diverse. For starters, leavening agents are seldom used, and in many forms of pastry that produce a crust or shell, such as shortcrust pastry, the goal is to keep the dough from rising too much.

The inclusion of fat to the dough prevents gluten from developing too firmly, resulting in a crumbly texture.

Several methods are used to generate the desired rise of the dough, such as in the numerous puff and flaky pastries. Layers are created by using the stronger gluten in pastry dough.

As with Danish pastries and croissants, moisture in the dough is transformed to steam, which is then trapped between these layers, causing the pastry to puff up.

The end product is a light, crunchy, flaky texture that is unlike cake.

Cheese, Banana and Tea Cakes?

Very distinct from one another. As we come to the numerous sweets created with pastry dough and cake batter, though, things start to get a bit confused.

If we disregard the savory applications of pastry and concentrate just on the sweet, we are left with two kinds of bases that may be eaten as is or filled, topped, stacked, or adorned in an unlimited number of ways.

Cakes and pastries may also be filled with cream, topped with fruit, and sprinkled with icing sugar, to mention a few options.

Nevertheless, as previously said, contemporary cakes may be sweet sweets other than those based on a baked batter, and can even utilize a pastry or pastry-like basis in certain situations.

Banoffee pie and cheesecake are both called cakes, but their bases are made of pastry or crushed biscuits and topped with dairy ingredients. There is no leavening agent in any of these cakes.

Fruit cake, banana cake, and tea loaves, on the other hand, straddle the line between cake and bread, emphasizing the connection between the two.

A Question of Culture

The underlying dough or batter typically determines whether a sweet treat should be classified as a pastry or a cake in the majority of circumstances. The rest seems to be a matter of tradition.

A pastry, at least in the English-speaking world, is nearly always created from pastry dough, but the parameters for what might be termed a cake are a bit more flexible. Several varieties of cakes have little or no flour and are hence not created from traditional cake batter.

The current popularity of gluten-free baking has given birth to a plethora of flour-free cakes, including some twists on old classics.

Nevertheless, not every culture categorizes its sweets in the same manner, and they may not have such a wide word as cake in their own language.

But it doesn’t really matter what you name it as long as you know how to create each one. You may be certain that whether it’s pastry or cake, it’ll taste just as fantastic!

Do you want to know more about cake and pastry? Check out our entries on different varieties of pastry and the functions of the components included in cake.