Cake with an impenetrable crust?
I recently baked the golden vanilla cake from King Arthur FLour's website. It baked nicely, and looked really nice. However, when I was at my cake decorating class, I had to level and torte that cake, and for the life of me, I could not get my cake leveler to go through the cake! It just bounced off and would not go through the cake, no matter how hard I pressed, or sawed. I eventually resorted to using a serrated knife, but even that was incredibly difficult to cut through.
Is there something I did when making the cake? I know I used a 9 inch pan instead of the 8 inch it asked for, but that was the only change I made. Or is this just an impenetrable cake?
Best Answer
I blame the recipe, which calls for absurdly long mixing times, well past the point of overmixing.
After you add the wet ingredients, the recipe has you mix for:
- 30 seconds at low speed for the milk
- 30 seconds at medium speed for the milk
- An unspecified amount of time at low speed to incorporate the first egg
- 2 minutes at medium speed for all the eggs (30 seconds after each)
That is simply way too much mixing for a cake. Personally, I don't even like the concept of using an electric mixer at all, except to cream the butter. But that's over 3 minutes of mixing and it is simply too high. You'll end up with extremely tough, chewy cake, practically bread.
If you look at the top-rated from-scratch cake recipes on various recipe sites (e.g. Epicurious) you'll see that they all either call for incorporating the wet ingredients either by folding with a rubber spatula (best) or with an electric beater at low speed.
Beware of "manufacturer" recipes - I don't think I've ever had a positive experience with one. You would think that they are authoritative sources, but in practice you'll achieve much better results with a search engine and careful reading of the reviews.
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Why does my cake have a hard crust on top?
From my own personal experience hard crust can be caused by over greasing and flouring cake pans, too much sugar in recipe, and over baking.. When a pan is over greased the crust can literally fry and if flour is used it can burn, forming a dark hard crust on a finished cake.How do you keep a cake from getting hard on a crust?
Prevent this hard crust by making some changes to how you bake your cakes.What makes a tough cake?
The culprit behind what makes a cake tough could be overmixing your flour. Flour is the foundation of baked recipes because it provides structure. When combined with liquid and after mixing, flour's protein (gluten) begins to develop.What can I do with Unrisen cake?
Crumble it completely, add either some chocolate ganache to it, if it is a chocolate cake, or some icing cream to another one, and mix. make small sized balls of the mixture, and then dunk them in melted chocolate. If you want, you can decorate them with sprinkles and other stuff.Secrets to a perfect semi naked cake - tips, tricks, hacks
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