10 Most Common Mistakes To Avoid While Baking A Cake

There are some times when you are at home with your loved one, and you decide to surprise them with a fresh home-cooked cake. It is fun to get in the kitchen from time-to-time preparing meals for family and friends. But, it is not always a walk in the park baking a cake as compared to preparing a usual dish. There are some common baking mistakes every successful baker once faced at some point at the beginning of their baking career. While hopes can be shattered with a cake disaster you can turn things around with help from experts. You can also order online cake delivery and have the cake just in time for your gathering.

Whether you are making birthday cakes or anniversary cakes, there are important principles you must follow to avoid making mistakes. Continuing on the subject, in this post, we share the ten most common mistakes to avoid while baking a cake. Read on.

1. Not preheating the oven

Most people miss the important phase in prepping for the bake - pre-heating the oven. With so much to do and prepare for the bake, they focus on the cake mixture then crank up the oven once they insert the cake.

It ruins the whole baking chemistry, to avoid creating this disaster, let the oven pre-heat completely before you start baking.

2. Wrong ingredient measurement

If the cake ingredient measurements are not precise, you will get an uneven chemical reaction with the timing on your recipe instructions.

You need to be consistent with the recipe requirements, if you wish to bake a bigger or small cake than what the recipe instructs you have to adjust the ingredients appropriately. And use the correct measurements be it a cup, spoon, or grams.

3. Frequently opening the oven

When you are still practising your baking skills, it is a common thing that you will frequently open the oven to see your cake progress. This, however, causes heat to escape the oven.

Once the temperature decreases, you will start incurring common baking problems like a cake collapse. So you must use the oven light and window to check if your cake is well baked.

4. Leaving the cake too dry or too wet

It is important to stick to your recipe timing, if you decide to adjust the quantity of your ingredients, you also have to change the bake time. The main reason is that heat must be distributed evenly. If you bake the cake much longer than instructed in the recipe, the cake will become too dry and soft in the middle. So if the cake comes out dry, make small holes on the top, then brush sugar syrup to permeate the cake giving it the much-needed moisture.

But if it looks well baked from the outside but wobbly; you have to turn down the temperature by 20 to 25 degrees celsius. So that the already cooked top does not burn, you have to cover the cake with foil. And use a dry toothpick to check for doneness.

5. The cake flour is not blending smoothly

When the cake dough is assuming an undesired texture (uneven, lumpy, stiff, or runny structure), this is a sight that you have used the wrong amount of flour or you did not properly sift the flour.

Make sure that you use the correct measurements and sift your flour when preparing for the bake.

6. Ingredients are at the wrong temperature

Another baking mistake most new and upcoming bakers do is using ingredients that have the wrong temperature. Room temperature is the ideal temperature for baking.

 

Because baking involves the use of dry and wet ingredients; you have to make sure that the milk, eggs, or butter are at room temperature. So you do not have to cut corners and just proceed to mix the ingredients.

7. Using rough egg whites

When you beat eggs but they still maintain their rough state, it can be that you are using stale eggs. It might also be a result that the temperature is not right.

Or that the whisker and bowl are wet, so you must also make sure that your whip and bowl are completely dry before you start whipping.

8. The cake mix is not baking evenly

It is unlikely that oven heat will remain constant throughout the bake, there are certain parts of the oven that harbour hotter pockets of air.

So if the cake pan remains on the same position throughout the baking session, the cake will not bake evenly. You must make sure that you rotate the cake to avoid this problem.

9. Cakes are not baking with a flat top

If you are baking layered cakes and you discover that the cake is not baking with a flat top, you have to even out the dome shape by wrapping the cake with a damp towel on the edges.

10. Cookies or cupcakes are not giving an even surface

You may be baking cookies or cupcakes, the processes may be a bit different from one another, but the main principles remain the same.

If the surface is not flat and even this could be because you use cold dough, so set your dough aside at room temperature for about 30 minutes and then bake.