Baking is a great hobby with delectable results! It’s a therapeutic hands-on activity that many people from the younger generation have taken up. But it can play tricks on you, sometimes.

When you’ve worked hard on your cake, it can be rather discouraging to have it not come out as desired. From setting the wrong oven’s temperature to opening the oven door too early, there are so many reasons beautiful cake turned out to be a sunken disappointment.

But fret not, our team has identified some of the most common pitfalls when it comes to cake making and the reasons behind those disasters, so you know what to fix. Here’s a cake troubleshooting guide to help you!

The Cake Is Dry

Sometimes, you won’t know what’s wrong with your cake till you take your first bite. It is disappointing when your taste buds are hit with a dry sponge stuck in your mouth.

The Cake Sinks In The Middle

While a cake can rise because of its leavening agents and heat, once it has been removed from the oven, your cake will contract. This happens because gluten structures is strengthened too much and creates more air pockets which causes the cake to rise during baking but fall after the air has escaped.

The Cake Is Cracked

When it comes to baking, following the temperature in your recipe book is great for your first time trying out the recipe. But you won’t always get the perfect cake the first time around. Small cracks may still be acceptable, especially for shaping the cake, but deep cracks are a big problem. Here are the reasons for that issue.

The Cake Becomes like Bread

If you’re experimenting with personalizing the recipes you find online, there’s a chance that you may end up with a cake that has a more bread-like consistency. If you’re not sure what exactly what part caused this outcome, it was possibly one of the reasons below:

The Cake has Soggy Edges

Nobody likes anything soggy, especially when it’s a cake! You might want to look into these reasoning below if your cake turned out to have soggy edges.

The Cake is Dense

Cakes are loved for being light and fluffy. There are various leavening agents to make them rise for different recipes, but there are many other things that can affect the density of your cake as well.

The Cake is Flat

The perfect cake is beautifully risen with a light, spongy texture to it… except yours hasn’t risen and is flat as a pancake.

Cake is Stuck in the Pan

When you take your cake out from the oven, it looks perfect. But your joy stops there as you can’t take it out of the pan. It could happen because of several reasons.

The Cake is Too Hard

When you bite into a cake, you expect it to be soft and fluffy. Having your cake being hard is so disappointing, especially when you spent all those time waiting for it to be ready.

The Cake is Too Moist and Sticky

If you’re not making any of our traditional Malaysian desserts like kuihs, your cakes really shouldn’t be too moist and sticky. In fact, the only reason why any cake should be sticky is if you have added on toppings like glazes or chocolate ganache.

The Cake is Uneven

There are hot spots in your oven where the temperature is higher than other areas and is different for every oven. You can fix this by rotating your cake a few times while it is baking. However, they may be other reasons why it is uneven as stated below.

The Cake is Overflowed

Other than being cracked, cakes can sometime get out of the pan and overflowed! These reasons might help you to know the correct methods to avoid overflowing.

The Cake Shrunk

Your cake started off at a good size and now it’s shrunk! Though it might still be edible, you would want your cake to look pretty too.

The Cake’s Crust is Too Hard

Having a too hard crust will make your entire cake hard to bite. Below are the things you need to look into so that the next time you bake, you will bite into a soft crust!

The Cake Has Holes 

If your cake has holes,you can always fill them with frosting to cover them up, but of course preventing them in the first place is the better plan.

We, My Weekend Plan, hope all these explanations would help you to bake the perfect, flawless cake. It’s okay to make mistakes especially when you are a beginner, but there is always room for improvement.

All the info is based on our experiences in our baking journey. Do let us know if you have any extra insights.

In the meantime, if you are an aspiring baker and curious to explore more about the baking world or want to know more about dessert recipes and tips and tricks, you can head on over here or browse through an array of both of our online and offline classes. If you’re a social media enthusiast, you can stay updated through our Facebook.