If you make a cake right, it comes out fine whichever method you use. The recipe, the proportions and the particular ingredients matter the most. More than any other baking, cake cares what flour, what sugar and what shortening you use in which proportion. I've used both methods, and some others, and they all work fine. Unless I'm making something special, I don't bother with cake flour. I usually prefer a firm crumb to flyaway, and use Gold Medal bleached AP, or similar. For home, I'll use an organic with a little more protein, and keep an eye on not overbeating.

There are two reasons for creaming the sugar and butter first. The sugar melts into the butter assuring it won't stay grainy, and the sugar helps the butter hold the air you whip in, the thing that makes the color lighten is air. That trapped air assists in a light, open crumb. What KA calls "velvety", and I call "greasy", is a denser, mooshier texture that comes from coating the flour with butter and sugar. This does keep gluten from forming, so preserves tenderness in the face of overbeating, and gives that institutional, almost gooey crumb, rather than airy loft. But if you also manage to whip in some air, or a little more baking powder, you'll get some more loft with the greasy, and if you use a little more butter, or beat the dry in a little harder, you'll get a little denser. Plus, the biggest difference is in the ingredients.

Louise, if the cake was good it was good, no matter which way you made it.

Please explain 'reverse creaming'?

I usually make Betty Crocker's one bowl cakes where all the ingredients go in the bowl together and are mixed with an electric mixer for 1 minute on low speed, 3 minutes on high. They are pretty foolproof, without all the 'cream butter and sugar, add eggs, add flour and liquid alternately' steps.

Have not tried it myself. Agree with plllog regarding “if the cake was good…”

This from King Arthur might be worth checking. Rose Levy Beranbaum can be a good source.

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2022/03/09/what-is-reverse-creaming-and-why-does-it-make-great-cake

This is timely. My daughter and granddaughters were here today and they all raved about the cake and i made it a month ago. They want it again! So maybe it was good.

I don't know your granddaughters, but if they're kids, and asked for repeats, you can be pretty sure they liked it. :)

I had to look up ‘reverse creaming’. It seems to me it would only work if you are using an electric mixer. Conventional creaming allows the dry ingredients to be incorporated gradually into a liquid. I would think that trying to mix butter into the dry ingredients would be much harder work with a wooden spoon and you could end up with lumps of unincorporated flour or sugar.

I rarely make cakes anymore, but I did buy a set of six inch cake pans so that I could make smaller cakes. However, I have not gotten around to this, and I should have realized that I could just make cupcakes instead.

Interesting - thanks for the link - now I want to try that. Feel like I saw a recipe somewhere else recently that used this technique...?