Troubleshooting Baking: How to Make Baked Goods Better

Patience is harder to troubleshoot...

My dad describes Tech Support as pretty much like trivial pursuit: that one little bit of trivia you don’t know is often known by someone else so ask around. I find this goes for baking as well, for sometimes you don’t know why your cake turned out this way, or how come your oven burns everything. So, while it may not solve every issue, it may help with a few to look through very common situations and list a few reasons why something is going on. For some of you, these will be obvious but that’s okay, means you know enough to help someone who is just learning how to bake. Who knows, maybe you will learn why your mother always did a certain thing before baking cookies that you take for granted now.

The biggest issue that happens even to the best of bakers, is burning what you put inside the oven. Don’t say you haven’t, majority of you remember that one time when you were making something simple like pancakes and flipped it over to find a charcoal mess. Why does that happen? If you don’t properly oil your pan before you start the pancakes up, they are very likely to burn. Properly in this case means coating the pan in a light bit of oil with a paper towel and heating it until it gets to temperature (easiest way to tell is by sprinkling a bit of water on the pan, if it sizzles, it’s ready.). Only flip the pancakes when bubbles start to appear around the edges, too soon or too late will leave you with either a mess or a burnt pancake. Then, after each round or whenever you notice the pan is dry, re coat it with the paper towel. Follow those steps and you will have your whole batch looking nice as opposed to all but the first two.

Other reasons for burning come to a few misconceptions by new bakers who don’t realize exactly how baking works. The heat causes the baked good to react in a certain way and temperatures are your guide to this. Always follow instructions when it comes to making sure that your temperature and time are correct. Most modern ovens have timers but if you don’t want to work with that you can ALWAYS use your phone. Go into your clock function and find the timer section. Set it and keep close to your oven, especially if you are prone to getting distracted while doing something. As mentioned before, I tend to do the dishes after I am done baking because not only does it clean up the kitchen, but if something happens to my baked good, I can jump on it right away instead of waiting for the fire alarm to go off. Lastly, no, turning up the temperature will not make the cake bake faster. What it will do is burn your outside before the insides are fully cooked. Extremely uneven cooking that no one will want to touch, which brings us to our next problem.

Nothing is more disappointing for me than baking something, doing the toothpick (or in my case, butter knife) test to find out that while the outside looks amazing, the inside might as well be nicknamed “the blob”. So, you didn’t bake it fully, but how did that happen? Outside of not baking it for long enough or not hot enough, there is another thing that might have done it. You know how they say preheat the oven as the first step? There is a reason for that, if you just put things in while it is preheating, you will not get the full baking heat while still keeping it in for the right time. So, don’t skip that step. Yet what about if the outside of a cake is too crispy but the inside tastes fine? Sure it could have been left in a little too long, but another culprit may have to do more with your pan than the oven. See, dark metal pans or glass ones will get hotter and stay hotter longer. So if you use one for a recipe that doesn’t specifically say glass or dark metal, it is best to lower the temperature of the oven about 25F in order to prevent the sides touching the pan from turning extra crisp. One last thing involving oven heat: use your oven light, do not open the oven. It will make sure the heat stays in so your cake will not sink into itself due to the temperature change. Also it will make it more likely to be under cooked in the middle!

Alright, we’ve covered most of the oven issues, what else is there to deal with? A few things actually, first to keep your baked good from clinging to the side of the pans, grease all sides and the corners of the inside. I find it’s better to have a little grease around the edge of the cake than a cake that won’t leave the pan you baked it in. To avoid unwanted flavors though, I recommend vegetable oil because it has less of a flavor to it than olive oil or butter. One last thing I’m going to cover here is one that has two possible reasons behind it: a dry cake. Cakes get dry for usually one of two reasons: either you put too much flour in that made it have no moisture or you overmixed the cake. Too much flour makes sense, after all, it would absorb all the water, but overmixing seems a bit weird until you realize what is going on when you mix a cake. When you mix a cake, you are combining ingredients together just enough so you cannot find a specific ingredient in the cake. If you keep going beyond that, you’re going to cause gluten in the flour to form into strands. This means it gets way more dense and chewy, like bread and bread is usually rather dry, isn’t it? This is why you cannot go crazy on the mixing, no matter how much you want to.

That’s all the troubleshooting I have for now, what did you learn by reading this? One of the odder things I learned is that the flat spoon like measuring cups are supposed to be used only for solids and the measuring cups that have a spout are only for liquids. I’ve used them interchangeably but it makes sense if you think about it. The spout makes it easy to pour liquids and the flat edge of the other ones works for leveling off an ingredient. I just figured a cup was a cup and measured away, but now I will try to keep that in mind the next time I bake. Hope you found this interesting, I sure did, and I will see you all on Horror Tuesday.