12 Common Mistakes When Making a Cake

 12 Common Mistakes When Making a Cake

1. Replacing ingredients

If you are a beginner in the kitchen, don't be too adventurous when swapping ingredients. Read a little more about possible substitutions and use common sense when swapping ingredients.

2. Beating the batter too much

Movies, soap operas... always show someone making a cake and beating it too much. Our mothers and grandmothers taught us this too. But for the recipe to work, the important thing is to mix the other ingredients and when adding the flour, only use upward movements, for example, without beating the cake batter too much. Beating the batter too much develops the gluten in the flour and will make your cake elastic.

3. Wet ingredients

Wet ingredients make your cakes cheesey. When we make cakes with fruit (bananas for example) or carrot cakes, use medium-sized ones, not large ones. The more fruit, the more moist your cake will be and it won't have the desired appearance. Another tip is to sift the flour and yeast, as they may be damp.

4. Lack of moisture

Exactly the opposite of the previous mistake. This happens when we use recipes with small eggs, for example. The dough becomes unbalanced and the result will be a dry and crumbly cake.

5. Choosing the flour

The ideal flour for making cakes is type 45, which is low in gluten. This is the opposite of bread, which requires a flour with more gluten that will make the dough more elastic.

For cakes, also give preference to unleavened flours to have an exact proportion.

6. Speaking of yeast

Neither too much nor too little, use the exact amount. If you have those plastic measuring spoons, it is even better than a scale, as it will have difficulty with small volumes.

Too much yeast, the cake will rise, set and then crack. Too little yeast, the cake will not rise and may be dry.

Another mistake: if the yeast has been open for too long, it may have lost its properties. One tip is to use sachets of yeast, where the quantities are usually exact.

7. Type of pan

Nowadays, there are countless pans. Each recipe calls for a suitable pan.

It should be filled to 3/4 of its volume. This way, it will still have room to rise. When we put too little batter in the pan, the cake will be flat and may become dry. The same is true when the pan is too big for too little batter.

If we use a small pan, the batter will condense, preventing the center from cooking. This may be one of the reasons why your cake shrinks when you take it out of the oven.

8. Poorly greased pans

Grease the pan with butter/margarine and then flour. Some margarines contain a lot of water. This can be noticed when you grease your pan and check for drops of water, preventing the butter/margarine from sticking to the pan.

These drops stick to the batter and prevent the cake from unmolding properly. To avoid this risk, it is best to grease the pan with butter or line it with parchment paper.

There are sprays for greasing pans. They are excellent but are not suitable for very moist or low-fat dough. The spray can be used in recipes for yogurt cakes, for example, or 4 by 4 cakes, but for a sponge cake or moist dough, the use of the spray is not suitable.

9. Oven with improper temperature adjustment

This is one of the most difficult errors to correct. You need to know your oven. If when you put a cake in, it cooks too quickly and burns quickly, your oven is probably improperly adjusted. The same goes for a cake that takes a long time to cook. Only a technician can adjust the temperature of an improperly adjusted oven.

10. Wrong oven temperature

Check what the recipe says. But cakes are usually baked at 180ºC. There is no point in rushing. Do not increase the oven temperature to cook faster.

Another tip is to preheat the oven. Heat it for 15 to 20 minutes before putting your cake in. This is the ideal time to reach the desired internal temperature. There is no point in preheating it for, for example, 5 minutes before putting the batter in, as the temperature will not be reached in time.

11. Overcooking, undercooking

If the cake is still raw on the inside, it will deflate when you take it out of the oven. Always do the toothpick test. It should come out dry, with nothing stuck to it.

Is your cake burnt on top and raw on the inside? Place a sheet of aluminum foil on top of the cake. This will prevent it from burning further and the baking process will continue normally.

12. Unmold it before the time

Not too late, not too early. When it comes out of the oven, give your pan a shake (this helps the cake to come out) and wait 5 minutes before unmolding it. This applies to most cakes, but there are exceptions.

Sponge cake, for example, should not be unmolded while hot. A cake with a balanced batter can be unmolded while still hot. Use common sense. Generally, 5 to 10 minutes, from the time it is removed from the oven and unmolded, is a good amount of time.