Failed chocolate sponge
I'm new to bakery and I can bake chiffon and angel food cake alright, but everytime(3 times) I bake chocolate sponge, I always end up with something with good moisture but super stiff. What could I have done wrong and how can I make the cake more tender in texture? Thanks!
My recipe: 3 eggs, 40g butter, 40g(in egg white)+20g(in yolk) sugar, 60g flour, 20g cocoa powder for a 8-inch square baking pan. 170°C, 10min.
And what I did:
Separate the egg white and yolk, whip the white until there's a curly spike when I pick up the wisk. During the whipping process, pour in the 40g of sugar.
Add 20g sugar to the yolk and stir until the mixture gets a bit pale.
Add 40g of melted butter into the mixture and stir until the mixture is smooth. Pour 1/3 of the egg white foam into the yolk-butter mixture. Mix carefully as not to deflate the egg white. When mixed well, pour in the other 2/3 of egg white and mix.
Add in the flour & cocoa powder. Bake in preheated oven.
Best Answer
Sponge and pound cakes contain fat. Therefore, they are not usually made with pure egg leavening. Egg leavening relies on a protein-based foam (whipped eggwhites), and fat deflates protein-based foams and/or prevents them from "curing" at high temperatures.
If you found a sponge cake recipe without chemical leavening, this is a sign for a bad recipe. The best would be to search for a better recipe, especially if you are a beginner baker. Troubleshooting baking recipes is an advanced skill which requires both experience and theoretical knowledge - certainly attainable for the average home baker, but unnecessarily hard for beginners. With the tons of recipes available at your fingertips for free, it makes more sense to search for a better one. It will give you correct ratios and temperatures and save you failures and frustration.
And a small pedantic part: what you are making here is not a sponge cake, but a pound cake. They have the same ingredients, but sponge cakes are made using the creaming method, while pound cakes use melted butter. The upside: both of them are tasty :)
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What can I do with a failed sponge cake?
Slice the flop up and lay the pieces down on a lined baking tray, place in a 100\xb0C (80\xb0C for fan-forced) oven and leave for one to two hours or until crunchy and dried out. Store in an airtight container. Fix: Fold the broken pieces into ice cream. Or whip up this leftover cake pudding and no one will ever know!How do you fix a bad chocolate cake?
Use Ganache It makes a good edible glue to fill the cracks of your broken cake. Pour it with care and let it dry. If you will be baking chocolate cake, that's a perfect solution for the baking mistakes.Why does my chocolate sponge not rise?
Remember to add your baking powder next time. If you've chosen a complicated recipe, swap it for something simpler like a classic chocolate sponge. Make sure your baking tin is the right size \u2013 if it's too big the mixture won't rise enough to fill it. And last but not least, don't over whisk your mix.Why did my chocolate cake flop?
Over-Aerating the Batter For the most part, the air bubbles created by creaming and expanded by leavening are all you need. If you beat in more air when you add eggs and dry ingredients, you can create large bubbles that weaken the cake's structure and cause it to collapse.Incredible way to transform your failed cake🤩😋
More answers regarding failed chocolate sponge
Answer 2
My mother (a retired Irish Home Economics teacher!) says that a true sponge cake contains no fat (ie. no butter - butter in the recipe makes a 'butter sandwich cake', not a sponge). For her sponge, she separates the egg whites and yolks, beats them separately, and uses only the egg whites as the raising agent - and her sponges are beautiful!
Answer 3
try using a recipe without flour. or you could be over mixing the batter activating the gluten. or try another recipe!
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