Help out the Cake Fraggles!

Dear Tricia, I was making a 3 level cake for my boyfriend's birthday, and decided to try and save some time by baking the whole thing in one bundt pan. I tried compensating for baking time, but after the cake mostly baked and cooled, the whole thing collapsed in the pan because there was some uncooked batter in the center. I ended up throwing out the whole thing and not making life any easier. Was there something I did wrong other than not baking it long enough? And in the future, what could I have done to salvage a dessert from a mostly (but not entirely) baked and collapsed cake? And also what are ways to convert 3-layer recipes into something less work intensive?

Wow, I'm impressed! I've never made a 3 level cake for anyone without it involving a paycheck. Not even my husband. (I got him beef jerky for Christmas though. Pretty sure that counts for something in the Awesome Department.)
Basically what you did wrong was put way too much batter in the pan- there was just no where for it to go. Let's imagine you're back to square one and you're making the recipe in 3 pans. Each pan has... let me think of something cute and memorable... Cake Fraggles. Right, each pan has 3 Cake Fraggles that do the heavy lifting and push the cake batter up to rise and become a fluffy delicious birthday treat. As the cake rises it uses the sides of the pan for some extra support while those Fraggles do the heavy lifting. Got that image in your head? Ok, now imagine taking all of the cake batter, putting it in 1 pan, and expecting just 3 Cake Fraggles to lift up 3 times as much weight. It's too heavy the cake isn't going anywhere- definitely not up. So now you've got 3 exhausted Cake Fraggles who have given up and are moving on to cocktails by now, and cake batter that is just going to sit and sit and sit. Even if you left the pan in the oven for an entire day, the outside would over bake and be a crispy hot mess before the inside came anywhere close to baking. It's too much mass in too small of a space to give you the same results.
I hope I didn't get too far out there with the Cake Fraggle references. In my mind they're adorable and magical and house trained.

So what to do with the mass of uncooked batter? If you're cool with eating potentially raw eggs**, I recommend mixing it in with ice cream or adding heavy cream and putting it in an ice cream maker for some cake batter ice cream. For the stuff that is baked, you cut it into pieces and put it in a bowl or a parfait glass (let's be serious, who owns parfait glasses?) or a martini glass and layer it with fruit and whipped cream for a ghetto version of a trifle. You can also blend it up into cake crumbs, and use that to garnish your next baked goodie (free of What the Bleep moments I hope) like on the top of cupcake frosting or on the side of a cake.

In the future, if you're wanting to make a smaller version of a tiered cake, you've got to make less batter, first and foremost. Take your recipe, cut the measurement of each ingredient in half and go from there. If you fill a pan with batter and the pan is more than 2/3 full, you're in trouble. I don't event like to fill the pan more than half full, but you know your recipe better than I do. You've got to have some room on the side of the pan for the cake to rise. Give the Cake Fraggles a break already.

**For anyone who says "You can't eat raw eggs! I'd never do that! It's gross!" I just want to remind you that, next time you're digging into the raw cookie dough/eating your feelings, guess what's included? Raw eggs. I doubt that knowing that will stop you next time either you flip-flopper.

And that's how the carrot cake crumbles.

From my Facebook fan page:

My mother emailed me asking how to fix her friend's crumbly carrot cake. The e-mail said the cake had excellent flavor and moistness, but crumbled to bits when it was cut.

Ahh, carrot cake. Who doesn't love carrot cake? Or, rather, who doesn't love that its a delicious vehicle for cream cheese frosting into my belly? Yum. (On a side note, when I worked in a bakery, I always tried not to laugh when customers would get carrot cake because it was "healthier." It's cake, my friends. Cake with frosting and cream cheese. Lots and lots of both... But, whatever makes you happy.)
Crumbly carrot cake is a disappointment. I'm disappointed already. But there's a couple of very simple things that I want to talk about before I go into the possibility of it potentially being a bad recipe.

1. The size of the carrots and extra goodies you add at the end may be your culprit. For those of you living under a very large rock with no sunlight or ways of communicating with the outside world for the past 300 years, carrot cake calls for lots of extra stuff besides eggs, butter and sugar. You have your shredded carrots, raisins, nuts, pineapple... lots of bits and pieces of yummy little things. When you start adding all of this to cake batter, its going to disrupt the gluten. To put it very simply, gluten is the protein that holds your cake together. But when you start to add lots of stuff to your cake batter, it tears apart the gluten, making it much harder for the cake to hold itself together- hence the crumbliness. (Yes, crumbliness is a word. I checked.) So carrot cake, to begin with is going to fall apart a lot easier than something very simple like a plain chocolate cake just because its got a lot of extra gluten-tearing crap in it. Something your alleged "mother's friend" may want to try is shredding the carrots smaller, chopping the nuts smaller, and possibly even pureeing them all together. In most home kitchens that aren't pimped out like mine is (thanks to the miracle of wedding gifts- thanks everyone!), you're going to use a cheese grater to grate the carrots, which gives you pretty large-sized shreds. If you use a microplane (or some people just call it a zester), you get really small, fine shreds of carrots that aren't big and jagged enough to tear apart so much gluten. Here's what it looks like: I use mine all the time for lemon zest and parmesan cheese, its a well spent $15 investment.
I'm a fan of just pureeing everything together because when you add the nuts and fruit and carrots at the end, it gives you a really smooth batter with all the flavors but none of the chunks that make the cake crumbly. Its not your traditional looking carrot cake when you slice it- there's no giant shreds of carrots, but there's also no crumbliness. That's how you make awesome meatloaf too, without the annoying look of those little presumptuous chunks of carrots and celery. Yuck. (Plus, I just really like to use my food processor. So much fun that I'm borderline embarrassed.)

2. Lets talk about cutting cakes. Cutting cake is something I've done a LOT of, especially wedding cakes. (And that's a blog for another time. Holy Drama, Batman.) When you cut a cake with lots of stuff in it, you've got to use a serrated knife. That's the knife that has the little jagged teeth on it that hurts really bad when you cut your finger. (Let me make that mistake for you- you don't have to do it yourself.) When you use a serrated knife, you have to saw, not just push down. The teeth are on there for a reason: it looks like a saw because you have to SAW. By sawing with the knife, the knife does all the work and cuts the cake without destroying it, as long as you don't start pushing down. Try this next time: saw saw saw... don't press down.... saw saw saw.... don't press down. Make that your mantra. You'll be amazed at how nicely you can cut a piece of cake without tearing it apart.
Something else to consider when cutting cake, and this may be obvious to you, but its not to everyone: let the cake cool before you cut it. For real. Cutting warm cake, no mater what kind it is, is going to give you really messy, crumbly pieces. If you stick it in the fridge and cut it when its cold- even better if you're going to neat slices. But warm cake and a knife will never bode well for avoiding crumbliness. (I LOVE that word!)


3. I don't know what kind of recipe she used- perhaps its an old family recipe that's 100 years old- but I want to point out something.

Are you ready for it?




Wait for it.....








Wait for it......









Sometimes, recipes are BAD!!!!




No, its true, especially now that everyone can put whatever they want on the internet, and that includes a lot of really terrible recipes. Honestly, sometimes recipes just don't work. If you prefer to find your recipes online, try and avoid sites like cooks.com, where anyone and everyone can upload a recipe to share. There's no double checking on that website- some of the recipes are good, some of them are really horrible. For pretty solid, free recipes, I'm a fan of epicurious.com which features recipes from Bon Appetit and Gourmet, both of which (until the publishing industry started to crumble too) were super reliable sources. And for the best of the best recipe websites, I'd recommend joining cooksillustrated.com, which is $35 bucks a year. If you haven't read any of my blogs where I geek out of this website, let me tell you... its the best test kitchen in the country. They test recipes over and over and over again until they WORK, and as a bonus, you're never inundated with pictures of Rachael Ray, like some other food websites. This is the magazine that broke the news about using vodka for the flakiest pie crust ever. But if you're into cookbooks and not the internet, the best baking recipes I've used over the last 10 years were all found in The Fannie Farmer Baking Book. The basics, like chocolate chip cookies, banana bread, and carrot cake, are all really killer.
And what do you do when your recipe is bad? Just because a recipe is bad doesn't mean you can't change it. Play around with it, add some things, take some things away. Don't be afraid to have fun and make mistakes. I mean, if the author of the recipe already gave you a crappy recipe, you probably can't make it much worse. But if you do, you can always send me an email.

Its a Nice Day for a White Wedding Cake

Dear Tricia, How can I make WHITE white cake? Can I bake with the yolks? Do I have to separate them?

I'm going to refer back to an older blog from last winter about how to get white butter frosting:

OK friend, easy answer. Your icing turned yellow because half the ingredients in your recipe are YELLOW. The only way to fix this is to use icing with no yellow ingredients, or perhaps one of the following:

1. Learn to breed albino cows that make white butter with their milk.
2. Use only egg whites, or even better... use the white shell too for extra whitening. Hell, throw in some whitening toothpaste while you're at it. And a dash of Oxy Clean!
3. Re-construct the color spectrum so that our eyes see yellow as white. I see this one as the most feasible option.

For real though, anytime you want white icing, you're going to have to use mostly shortening as the fat because it's white. Even with butter cream icing, and listen up brides because this is directed at you, you'll never get solid white frosting because butter cream has BUTTER in it. It is yellow. It is not white and it never will be. (Although I've seen some crazy mothers of brides get away with some crazy stuff... maybe one of them will figure out how to change the color spectrum.)



This question is along those same lines, but on a less-extreme level that I promise I will judge you much less for. I think I might have been having a bad day when i wrote that.
You can't get white cake that is truly white if you add a bunch of whole eggs because yolks are- you guessed it- yellow. So the goal here is to add as few yellow ingredients as possible, or a large amount of whipped egg whites to offset the color. Think of angel food cake and how virginal white it is: the main ingredients are sugar, egg whites, flour, which are all white. However, those ingredients don't make for a very sturdy cake... Angel food cake would be like the Michael Jackson of cakes: super frail and white. But if you're looking for a sturdier (isn't it weird that "sturdier" is a real word? I think its weird.) cake that is less squishy and more suitable for decorating, you're going to have to add a few extra ingredients that will also make it less white, like whole eggs or butter, and that's ok, as long as the white stuff is the main ingredient.
Here's a recipe for a basic white chiffon cake with the whole egg, but you separate the whites from the yolks and beat them separately. It involves a few more steps than your average cake recipe, but if you can master it, is a traditional cake recipe that you will be able to use forever. When I was in pastry school, this was the type of cake we used for our basic white wedding cakes. It does have a fair amount of butter, but because of all the egg whites you're using, it will still be pretty white. My favorite recipe is from the Fanny Farmer Baking Book, but I've made some modifications to it.

1- 10' Cake

2 1/4 cups cake flour*
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
6 egg yolks
3/4 cup water
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
8 egg whites

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
1. Combine the flour, 3/4 cup of the sugar, baking powder, salt, and sift them together into a large mixing bowl.
2. Add the oil, egg yolks, water, and vanilla and beat until completely smooth.
3. In a separate large mixing bowl, beat the egg whites until they begin to foam. Slowly add the remaining 3/4 cup sugar and beat until the whites are stiff. **
4. Gently stir in 1/3 of the egg whites into the batter.
5. Drop the remaining whites on the batter and fold them in.
6. Pour into ungreased cake pan with parchment paper on the bottom.***

Bake until top is golden brown and the middle springs back when you press it with your finger. If you're using my oven, that's 25-30 minutes, but it could take way less in yours. Stop letting your oven timer rule your life and just check it every now and until for golden color and to test it with your finger.


*Refer to my "Hyper Hypo Loves Christmas Cookies" blog entry on why you should use cake flour instead of all purpose flour.
** Refer to my "Diana Ross, Daryl Hannah, and Your Meringue" blog entry on more tips for whipping super fluffy egg whites.
*** If you grease the pan, the batter won't have anything to grab on to as it rises. When its done, use a butter knife to loosen the cake from the sides of the pan and turn it upside down on a rack to cool.

Something Old, Something New, Something... ew, this cake is gross...

Dear Tricia, With my pending nuptials a mere days away, I got to thinking... why does wedding cake always taste awful? Wait, have I ever liked a cake at a wedding? Also do I remember anyone uttering the words, "Wow this cake is amazing!!!!!" No, so why do we have wedding cake? Where in history did they start serving cake at weddings? I know it is really not a problem question, but thought you may know the answer.

My dearest friend Doug wrote me an email, on the week of his wedding to his lovely fiance Kacey. I'm super happy to oblige him, and all of you, with a super informative answer. (Doug, this counts as part of your wedding present. See you in a couple of days.)
Oh, wedding cake. Cake cake cake. For those of you who know me, you probably know that on the contrary to most women, I HATE wedding cakes. I've decorated my fair share of them, and while I love the cake decorating part, I hate dealing with the bride and her mother part. I hate transporting cakes, I hate the stress of setting them up, I hate serving them to drunk people who just did the chicken dance, and have I already said that I hate dealing with brides and their mothers? I'm pretty sure that wedding cakes haven't always been this dramatic and annoying, but to make sure its not just me being jaded and bitter again, I looked up the history behind them. Lets go all the way back to the Roman era, shall we?
Back in the days of the Roman Empire, before Ace of Cakes was on the Food Network, a loaf of barley or wheat bread was baked so that the groom could break it open over his bride's head. Now whether or not he broke it open by actually making contact with his beloveds skull, or just broke it in half with his hands is beyond me. I'd prefer to imagine that he'd break it in half with his two hands like a gentleman, but the other one sure does make me giggle. The crumbs that dropped to the floor were supposed to symbolize a lifetime of good luck and fertility, and the guests were supposed to eat the crumbs. Mmm... who doesn't love feasting on bread crumbs that fell on the floor? Those Romans really knew how to party.
Moving onto Medieval England, sweet buns with stacked up in a pile and the bride and groom were supposed to try and kiss over the stack. If they could, it symbolized a lifetime of prosperity. (I think that "prosperous" equaled making it through The Plague.)
In the 17th century, the first historical dessert baked specifically for a wedding came around: Bride Pie. It was actually a savory pie filled with mince meats and decorated with a fancy pastry crust. A ring was hidden inside and whomever got the ring would supposedly be the next to marry. This seems like a pre-cursor to the whole circus-like event of tossing of the bouquet, but it seems much less lame to me. (Come on ladies, no one likes hearing a wedding DJ calling you out by name to catch the bouquet, along with a list of all the other single ladies at the reception.) Since people didn't sue a baker for finding random objects in their food back in the day, this was a long standing tradition until the 1800's.
When the mid 1800's rolled around, wedding cakes became more of what we know them as today: white cakes with decorative white frosting. Queen Victoria is rumored to have popularized the fancy, Victorian (those Victorians loved ornamental crap) style wedding cakes: her wedding to Prince Albert supposedly included a 300 pound wedding cake. Aside from the fact that white was a symbol of purity and virginity, refined white sugar was super expensive, and using it to make white frosting and cake was a display of the family's wealth. Big pimpin' = white frosting. They don't every show that in rap videos, do they?
Let's move on to present day, where Ace of Cakes rules the land of TV. (And I'm totally fine with Ace of Cakes. Let me make that clear. I've made the trek to Baltimore just to get a photo of Charm City Cakes.) Throughout the 20th century, wedding cakes were increasingly seen as tiered or stacked cakes, sometimes separated by columns, and always frosted with decorative designs or flowers. And eventually, the designs of the cake took on more importance than the actual cakes themselves. I know this from experience: do brides ever want to talk about the flavor of cake first? No. They have a photo of what they want the cake to look like and the tasting comes in last. Sorry, taste buds. The cake is considered as much as a centerpiece of a wedding as the dress. Perhaps we can blame this on the 40-billion-dollar-a-year wedding industry. Or maybe we can call out all of the reality television shows about not just the wedding, but the wedding cake itself. Its almost become a sporting event to watch the construction and decoration of a wedding cake... the visual impression of the cake has simply become more coveted than the quality of the cake. More and more brides are choosing to have an 8-10 tiered cake with half of those cakes being made out of Styrofoam and frosted for a more dramatic effect. Do you know what its like to serve a cake to a crowd of 200 while discreetly trying to poke your fingers through the frosting to sort out the Styrofoam layers from the cake layers? Welcome to my life.
In the 90's, when fondant started to become popular (check out any of my cake decorating entries for more details on my anti-fondant stance), it became much more popular to see bright, primary colors on cakes, tilted layers, giant bows and crystals suspended from the cakes, with much less focus on boring pastels. Thank god. But this has also contributed to the focus shifting towards what the cake looks like, rather than focusing on the flavor.
So, to answer your question, bakeries are focusing more on the decoration of the cake and less on the quality of the cake because there's a demand for it. Millions of brides want their fairy tale dessert: even if its half way made out of Styrofoam and tastes mediocre. But since wedding cakes have evolved so much over the past few hundred years, there's definitely potential for them to keep evolving into perhaps, something simpler, or maybe obsolete altogether. (Which would certainly be my preference, but I probably don't have to tell you that.)
If you do go to a wedding and the cake is phenomenal, let me know so that I can alert the media and plug the hell out of the bakery. And if you continue to eat crappy wedding cake, my apologies... but the bride probably deserves a few dirty looks.

Uno, dos, tres... leches!

Dear Tricia, I was at an undisclosed location the other night and saw a "Cuatro Leches Cake." I thought, hmm . . . I've heard of Tres Leches, but Cuatro?? What's this new mystery milk? Better yet, what are all of the milks in these Mexican delights?

You know that U2 song, "Vertigo?" At the beginning he sings and counts "Uno, dos, tres, catorce." I've always wondered why he skipped counted 1, 2, 3, and then skipped 4 and went all the way to 14. Weird.
So lets talk tres leches cake. Tres leches means "3 milks" for those of you not fluent in the Espanol. It is a lovely Mexican dessert made with vanilla cake that is soaked in a sweet mixture of milk, condensed milk, and heavy cream, usually flavored with caramel. Its unbelievably good and when paired with a Big Mac value meal and a Pepsi Super Gulp, will most likely give you diabetes.
Cuatro leches cake is spanish for "4 milks." What's this elusive new milk, you wonder? Well, I looked up the recipe on the website for La Duni in Dallas, who are well-known for their award winning tres leches and cuatro leches cakes. They were very secretive about giving me any hints, but mentioned something called "arequipe sauce." So I looked further at other recipes that people had posted online. What I found is that cuatro leches is still soaked in the standard 3 milk recipe (again: regular milk, evaporated milk, and heavy cream if you have short term memory loss from going to too many Widespread Panic shows), but is always finished with arequipe sauce.
To make arequipe sauce, there are two steps: boil an unopened can of condensed milk in a water bath for about 2 hours. When you open it (carefully so that it doesn't explode and leave you with a kitchen covered in shrapnel), the end produce is called "dulce de leche." You've probably heard of this before but didn't know how to make it. Now you do, thanks to me. After you cool the boiled condensed milk, or dulce de leche, you wisk in another 1/2 cup of regular milk to it, and it becomes arequipe sauce. Drizzle your tres leches cake with that and its officially cuatro leches cake.
Now if we could figure out why Bono skips so many numbers on the way to 14. Let me know when you've got the answer to that one.

Box cake + sagging = worst baker ever

Dear Tricia, I am a really big fan of cheap box cakes. Especially the one that has the different colored rainbow sprinkles. But every time I make one the middle sinks in. Should I be embarrassed about my sagging problem? Please help.

Yes. You are officially the worst baker ever. What's worse than you being the worst baker ever is that you like cheap box cakes. Just fork over the extra 79 cents and buy the Duncan Hines brand already. You're embarrassing yourself.
That said, I can help you with your sprinkle cake conundrum. First of all, are you measuring everything correctly? I know its tempting to be all chef-like when you're baking and just throw in a pinch of this and estimate what a cup of that looks like, but with baking, you really do have to be exact if you're looking for the perfect sprinkle cake.
Do you live at high altitude? If you do, don't add as much water. A liquidy cake batter won't want to rise and stay risen. (See my pregnant cake post for an example of what proper cake results will look like)
Is your oven pre-heated? While a hot oven will force a cake into its submission and make it rise like no one's business, an oven that's not done pre-heating will basically just sip a cocktail, nudge your cake and ask, "Do you want to bake or what? Yeah, I didn't think so."
Make sure your pan isn't too big. It will definitely sag if the pan is too wide. Follow the directions on the back of the box and use their recommended cake pan size. My guess is that this is probably your problem: seeing as how you won't even buy the store brand cake mix, you probably don't want to fork over the dough for the right cake pan. Hey, I understand: times are tough. (cheapskate)
Last, when you are mixing the batter, bake it right away. Cake batter doesn't like to sit without being baked... it's on a mission to fill your belly. Let it do its job.
Just to be sure I didn't leave anything out, I checked the Duncan Hines website for cake baking tips, but after I read part that said "don't frost a warm cake" I knew they weren't going to be much help. And they weren't. They basically said half of what I said here but without the irreverent, judgmental humor. Where's the fun in that?
*UPDATE*
I forgot one of the most important baking rules ever!! Don't slam the oven door. When you're starting to get curious about how your cake is doing and you open up the oven door to check on it, close the door very gently. Shaking the cake before its completely baked just ruins the structure and collapsing is inevitable. Or, just look through the oven window instead of opening the door. Resist the temptation. Resist. The. Temptation.

My cake looks pregnant and might be a cannibal

Dear Tricia
My cakes always rise higher in the middle than on the sides. Its like they have a pregnant cake belly...or they were being cannibals in my oven and eating other parts of the cake. How do I keep that from happening?

It’s true: cakes do have a tendency to resemble something out of a maternity magazine, but they mean no harm, I promise. There’s a very simple solution, and you have a couple of options: There are cake pan strips that you can buy at cake decorating stores or craft stores that are meant to wrap around the cake pan to level out the top of your cake. However, I’d suggest saving yourself 20 bucks and make them yourselves. All you need is an old towel that you don’t use anymore, like that one you used to clean up your roommate’s hair dye catastrophe, or maybe the one you dry off your dog with. He can probably use a new towel anyway.
Cut the towel into 2- 3” strips (however tall your cake pan is), and wet them in cold water.
Wrap the wet towel strips snugly around your cake pan and pin or paper clip the ends together.
Bake as directed.
When your cake is done, you should notice a much less domed top, but you will never get a fully flat top. Unfortunately, there are laws of science that just cannot be challenged. However, if you want a straight top to frost and decorate, just flip the cake over and use the bottom as your canvas.