It doesn’t matter whether you’re a newbie on the baking scene or you’re got decades of baking experience under your apron, at some time everyone experiences the cake version of The Great British Bake Off‘s soggy bottom on a tart – cakes sink, crumble, crack and just disappoint.
Dr. Oetker has come to the rescue, though, with research that answers the internet’s most commonly asked cake-failure questions. After a LOT of experimentation, the German cake-mix company (actually, it sells everything from baking products to frozen pizza and has been working on perfecting recipes since it was founded 120 years ago) not only worked out why the most common failures occur but how to avoid them and what to do with your ‘cake fail’.
Seeing a cake that came out of the oven looking fluffy and delicious quickly shrinking into a sad, sunken state is a real blow to a baker. To avoid a sunken cake, Dr. Oetker’s experts recommend opening your oven door as infrequently as possible during the baking process, ensuring the cake is fully cooked before you open the oven door to let it cool and always sticking exactly to the recipe regarding the amount of raising agents you add. (Using raising agents that are past their used-by date can also cause the sunken effect.)
Raising agents start working as soon as they’re added to your mix so once they’re mixed in, you also should avoid waiting too long before putting the batter in the oven.
Stuck with a sunken treasure? You can always use buttercream – no one’s likely to complain about too much of that! – or fresh fruit to fill the well. And if you planned to use the cake for a sandwich cake, you could try putting the hollow sides on the ‘inside’ of the sandwich, filling the ditch with extra jam, fruit or cream, then icing over the top to hide the fact that you’ve flipped the cake ‘inside out’.
If your cake doesn’t get that lovely, pillowy look, there could be a number of things going wrong. According to the experts, you could have forgotten to add the raising agent or your oven might not have been hot enough when you put the batter in.
Your cake tin might also be too big, which means you didn’t fill it right up to the three-quarter mark. You also could’ve over-mixed the batter; the way to avoid this is to only mix the batter until you can no longer see the last ingredient you added.
There’s no need to worry too much as an under-risen cake in any case because it’ll still taste just as good and your flat top can be hidden with some strategic decorating. But if you really want to throw it out and start again, you could use it as a pie base, ice-cream topping or turn it into homemade cake pops.
Cracked cakes are usually caused by the flip-sides of some of the baking sins that cause a failure to rise; too much raising agent (rather than not enough), too hot an oven (rather than too cool) or too small a cake tin (rather than too big)! Over-mixed batter is a common cause of this cake problem too.
But if your cake comes out cracked and you’re still looking to serve it up, icing from a piping bag can be used to ‘glue’ it all back together long enough for you to cut it. If it falls apart on the plate, well, who’s going to complain at that point as long as it tastes nice?
This type of failed cake can harder to save if it’s so crumbly that it falls apart as soon as it’s out of the tin. To avoid this issue, make sure you use enough egg in your mixture, by taking into consideration the suggested egg size in the recipe (usually medium or large). A crumbly cake can also be blamed on too much flour so stick to the recipe on this ingredient rather than guesstimating the amount and cross-check with similar recipes online if you’re not sure.
To save a crumbly cake, you can always try sticking the cake back together using buttercream or icing but if it’s crumbling to the point of no return, you might be better off turning it into a trifle!
Some cakes, like pound cakes or fruit cakes, should be dense, but when you’re dealing with something light like a Victoria sponge, density is not a good thing. Excessive density in cakes not designed to be dense means you may have not added enough raising agent or have over-mixed the batter, so forcing too much air to escape.
Just to make things difficult though, you may also have under-mixed the batter, and so not added enough air to the mix! You also could have added the eggs too quickly; it’s generally advised to gradually add eggs one by one and mix them in individually.
A dense cake can’t be disguised for long by whacking on some icing so on this occasion, you could use it as a pie base, in small pieces in an ice cream sundae or for cake pops.