Cake Baking Mistakes to Avoid

From whisking a creamy butter to adding moist layers and coating it gently with a delicious frosting - baking a cake can be a wonderful and therapeutic process. As you watch the cake rise beautifully from outside the oven door, it may seem like pure magic!

But baking cakes from scratch is a scientific process, which has taken chefs years to practice and get right. This is why it is crucial to imbibe their wisdom and learn how to avoid the common pitfalls of cake baking. At Hafele Appliances, we've listed down easy solutions to 5 frequent mistakes so that you can turn that perfectly soft, fluffy and tasty cake of your imagination into a reality.

1. Using A Miscalibrated Oven

The first rule of baking most cakes is to preheat the oven to 180-degree Celsius (350 F). When set to this temperature, a reaction occurs that not only imparts a rich flavour to your cake but also ensures that it is perfectly baked. When preheated correctly to 350 F, your cake will rise, get the right texture, and brown without getting burnt.

However, did you know that when you set your oven to 350F, it may not actually be that exact temperature inside your oven? This is because your oven may get miscalibrated over time, leading to a temperature that is 25 to 50 degrees higher or lower than 350 F. This inefficiency could result in an undercooked or sunken cake.

While it is often advised to get an oven thermometer to combat this, getting a Hafele built-in oven may eliminate your need for one. Our oven displays accurately show you the set as well as the actual temperature inside the oven. This allows you to always get consistent baking results every time!

2. Scooping The Flour

Getting the measurements of your ingredients right is one of the most important aspects of baking a cake. A simple mistake that many often do here is directly scooping a measuring cup into the bag of flour. This packs in a ton of extra flour than the actual measurement of the cup and may lead to your cake being dry and hard in texture.

You can simply avoid this inaccuracy by measuring the flour on a weighing scale. (1 cup = 130 gm) If you don’t own one, you can also use the "scoop and level" method. First, add the scoops of flour you need into the cup and then level off the excess with the back of your spoon. This ensures that you get the correct flour measurement.

3. Using Old Leavening Agents

Leavening agents such as baking powder and baking soda work effectively only for a couple of months or a year. It’s quite usual for many bakers to use these ingredients and then forget about them. What happens after that is these leavening agents won’t work as effectively and may even go stale. Using these very old or expired dry ingredients may result in a cake that has not risen properly and is dense.

4. Adding Cold Ingredients

Remember that preparing a cake butter involves the process of emulsion. When the butter is blended well, the added ingredients emulsify together to later give you the desired airy cake. But, if the ingredients are too cold, they won’t emulsify well together. A perfect example of this is adding cold butter straight from the fridge. If you add chunks of butter directly, it will form lumps in the cake butter.

This is why you should add butter, eggs, and milk at room temperature to bake a perfect cake. For the butter, the consistency needs to not be too hard or even melted. As for cold eggs, you can keep them in a bowl, add water, and let them rest for 5 to 10 minutes before adding them to the cake butter.

5. Mixing The butter Improperly

One of the common mistakes of mixing the butter is that one may undermix or overmix the butter. While excessive beating of the butter will overwork the gluten and lead to a hard cake, undermixing it will cause it to crumble. To prevent this, the trick is to separately mix the dry and wet ingredients and then use the creaming method to combine them.

• First, the butter and sugar are beaten together until they turn fluffy.
• Then, eggs are beaten in one at a time.
• Lastly, the dry and wet ingredients are alternatively added to the butter mixture and then gently mixed until they are combined.

To get exceptional and smooth butters for baking cakes, you can use the Klara Kitchen Machine from Hafele Appliances. It whisks cake butters like a professional chef would, which in turn gives the precise baking results you need.