When you're new to making cakes, you may run into mistakes or questions that leave your cake less than perfect or not as pretty as you hoped. So today we've gathered common cake-baking questions and their solutions.
Cake is a hugely popular bake that you can find in shops everywhere. Loving cake may inspire you to make your own homemade cake, but you may run into some problems along the way. Common cake-baking mistakes fall into two main types: problems with the outside of the cake and problems with the crumb.
1. Problems with the Outside of the Cake (Before Cutting)
- Hard crust: caused by too much heat, which hardens the crust where it gets the most heat, or sometimes by too much sugar. Fix it by using the right temperature and reducing the sugar.
- Thick crust: usually related to baking heat; a thick crust often comes from baking at too low a temperature.
- Cake doesn't rise: baking powder, which makes cakes rise, may have been used in too small an amount, or it may be old. Use fresh baking powder, which is white and free of lumps, and measure it accurately.
- Cracked top: caused by poorly combined ingredients, a batter that is too dry, or an imbalance between water and flour that makes the batter too heavy. Fix it by measuring your proportions correctly.
- Shrinking cake: caused by an imbalance of water and flour, in this case too little flour or too runny a batter, or by baking too long.
2. Problems with the Crumb
These become noticeable when you cut the cake or taste it:
- Coarse crumb: usually caused by too much baking powder, insufficient baking heat, or unbalanced ingredients, especially too few eggs.
- Dense, hard crumb: caused by too little sugar, too much flour, or too little fat such as butter or margarine.
- Poor flavour: caused by too much baking powder and unbalanced ingredients.
Making cake, or any baked good, requires great care in measuring every ingredient exactly as the recipe says. Adding too much or too little of something will lead to problems like these.
