2024 Author: Jasmine Walkman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 08:29
Baking the cake it can be quite easy, but if you are not careful, things can quickly go wrong. If you have problems in some of the stages of cake preparation, you are probably making one of the mistakes below.
You usually won't notice it until the cake is ready. The goal is to learn from your mistake and find out what went wrong, so that you never take a sad and cracked cake out of the oven again.
1. You use substitutes
The biggest error in baking the cake is non-compliance with the prescription. Using more or less ingredients or another ingredient than what is stated in the recipe will not always lead to a problem. But if the cake turns out to be weird, you won't know if it was from the ingredients or your substitution method. So, until you make sure that the cake recipe is written correctly, do not make any changes to it. And even then change only one element. That way, when you follow the recipe and then change something and it doesn't work, you'll know exactly what caused the problem.
2. You do not weigh the flour properly
The next biggest mistake is changing the amount of flour. This is not necessarily your fault - many cake recipes still list flour in cups, not by weight, although cups are a known inaccurate way to measure flour. Using a measuring cup in a bag of flour can result in 30 percent extra flour than what a "cup" actually means. This extra flour can definitely ruin the recipe, making the cake hard, dry and crumbly.
Instead, weigh 130 grams of flour for each cup of flour in the recipes. This also applies to recipes that refer to cake flour. Just weigh your flour, not scoop it up: 130 grams is 130 grams, whether it's cake flour, cake flour or bread.
3. Use old baking powder and baking soda
Chemical dissolving agents such as baking powder and baking soda are what help your cakes swell, and like any ingredient in the closet, they end up sometimes stagnant. These products have an effective life of about six months. They will still work after that, but not so well. If your baking powder is old, no matter how strictly you follow the recipe, your cake will not be perfect.
The solution: Take a new packet of baking powder and baking soda and mark them with the date six months in the future. When that date comes, throw away everything else and replace them.
4. Mixing incorrectly
This is another one error when making cakeswhich you can do if the recipe you follow only offers vague or ambiguous instructions that you can see in mixed cake recipes such as carrot cake or butter cake.
Most of all, however, you will use the creaming method, which calls for a combination of butter and sugar until light and fluffy. But when exactly is that? Much of the process is a matter of experience - the fastest way to gain experience is to bake a lot of cakes, by which time you will already know what you are doing.
5. Use cold ingredients
Cake batter is an emulsion, which means that it is a mixture of ingredients - wet and dry, fats and liquids that would not normally be combined (consider mayonnaise as an example). And one of the reasons an emulsion fails to come together is because its components are too cold.
Which makes sense - hard pieces of butter will not mix with anything. In the dough, these pieces of butter will turn into a cake with a crumbly texture that will not rise well.
That's why, when baking a cake, leave the butter, eggs, milk and all other chilled ingredients at room temperature before mixing. Half an hour is better than nothing, but if possible wait at least an hour.
6. Do not calibrate the oven
Here's a paradox: setting your oven to 180 degrees doesn't necessarily mean it's that much! Over time, your oven may become incorrectly calibrated and the actual temperature may be 25 to 50 degrees higher or lower than you think. This can cause any problems when baking a cake - from the concave environment, to cracked edges.
The solution: Get an oven thermometer. Then set your oven to the given degrees and see what the thermometer reads. If there are deviations, correct accordingly.
7. Improperly cooled cake
If the cake you have a damp base or a sticky tip, which means it has been cooled incorrectly, either because you left it in the pan to cool completely or you took it out and then wrapped it in plastic while it was still warm.
Freshly baked cake it needs air circulation and even if you plan to cool or freeze it and then serve it later, you still need to let it cool completely before wrapping it.
After letting the cake cool in the baking tray for 10 minutes, you need to take it out and let it cool outdoors so that air circulates all around it.
And now that you know what can go wrong when you bake a cake at home, then maybe you have more confidence to make a delicious sponge cake. Among the sweet temptations with which you can start your culinary experiments are Sacher cake or your favorite classic - Red Velvet Cake.
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