As a guide, check on the cake 5 minutes before the recipe states (looking through the door, not opening it). Even I have to sometimes give the cakes a bit less or longer in the ovens we’ve been using for years. If you think you can set the timer on your oven to whatever your recipe says and walk away, you are doomed to never make a good cake! Dramatic, I know, but each cake and oven is slightly different so you’ve got to take it on a cake by cake basis. Lumpy Cake Batter Source: Flickr TIMING IS EVERYTHING So basically, you’ve got to get it juuuust right. Undermixing is also a bad thing, as lumps of flour will affect how evenly the whole thing rises. If you keep mixing, it develops the gluten bonds in the flour which is great for a chewy loaf of bread, but terrible for a fluffy cake and the little bubbles trying to pull the stringy flour up. Once you’ve added the flour to your mix, you need to gently fold or mix it in and then stop as soon as it looks combined. But flour needs a little bit of gentle encouragement or it tenses up. When you’re dealing with things like butter and sugar, they actually like a bit of a beating, it softens them up. One of the most important things to take care with when making your cake batter is how you go about mixing it. Do yourself a huge favour and buy an oven thermometer (less than £10) and adjust the oven dials accordingly until they match the temperature in the recipe. The problem is, almost all home ovens aren’t very accurate and their temp can be out by a catastrophic number of degrees. The correct heat will raise your cake batter up in the first two thirds of baking, before ‘setting’ and become stable enough to take out of the oven. I’d be willing to wager a fair few quid that most baking disasters stem from oven temperature or a rubbish heating element. The good news is that if you think you’re hopeless at baking, you’re most definitely NOT, you just need to know what’s going wrong. Unfortunately, there are quite a few factors that affect these bubbles, so you do need to take care when baking, in a way you just don’t need to with most conventional recipes. Sunken Cake Syndrome, Source: Party Animal Online So what do you think happens if anything affects the little bubbles that are on a mission to lift up the other ingredients? That’s right, sinking cake syndrome. Most recipes will use a chemical raising agent because it’s a lot more predictable and a lot less hard work than whisking for 3 years. You get the bubbles in there with a chemical raising agent like baking powder or by whisking up egg whites. I promise.īasically, the thing that makes a cake rise is bubbles, and lots of tiny little ones. It’ll stop you from having a full on existential melt-down as you ponder why you can’t even bake a simple cake. It doesn’t have to be the dull science of your school days, but it does serve you to know a teensy bit about what’s going on when you make a cake. The thing is, and I know you’ve heard this before, baking is a science. Have you ever found yourself on your knees screaming to the baking gods: “Why won’t my cake rise?!!” after an afternoon of measuring, mixing and nervous peeks through the oven door?
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