![]() So why do cakes get taller in the center? Adriana Patterson, PhD, says, “The reason why cakes dome is because the outer perimeter of the cake sets before the interior. Photo by Joseph De Leo, Food Styling by Kaitlin Wayne The dark brown edge and domed cake center here shows that the perimeter of the cake cooks and sets faster than the center. Essentially, the moment the cake goes in the oven, the heat causes it to rise, and then set-that is, it sticks that way. “When the batter gets to around 155 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit, it will start to firm up as the gluten proteins in the flour cook,” Farrimond tells me. Those chemical reactions don’t last forever, though. If the recipe uses chemical leaveners, like baking powder and baking soda, their chemical reactions speed up at this time, giving the batter an additional lift. Stuart Farrimond, author of The Science of Cooking , explains that as the batter warms up, the air bubbles trapped in the fat (usually butter) during the creaming process expand, forcing the cake to rise. To understand why cakes don’t always bake with perfectly even tops, it’s important to understand what’s going on as cakes bake in the first place. While these are both simple solutions, I had to wonder if you could prevent cakes from doming at all. Working in a professional bakery years later taught me that most pros bake their cakes in sheet pans, then cut out circles to form the layers of their cakes. Shortly after, I learned that most people just use a serrated knife to trim the domes off the top of their cake layers and call it a day. When dessert time rolled around, I opened the fridge to find that the top layer of the cake had completely slid off and onto the shelf in my fridge-the bottom layer had not magically become level, and gravity betrayed me. ![]() My solution, rather than trimming the cake to make it flat, was to just place one cooled layer dome-side down on the platter, frost it, then place the other layer on top, dome-side up.Īfter carefully decorating the cake, I put it in the fridge to let the frosting set and proceeded to have dinner with my friends. ![]() Instead of a cake with a flat surface, I had something that looked more like a wide muffin. I followed the recipe to a T, but the cake domed in the center. Years ago, when I was a young hotshot home baker who didn’t play by anybody’s rules, I baked a cake for a dinner party that ended in a hilarious (but embarrassing) catastrophe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |