How to get a colossal cake
Have you ever had problems with ill-risen, compacts, burnt or uncooked cakes, this page is made for you.

I will not here detail recipes of pound cakes or brownies. I will only explain how to master preparation and cooking.

Baking powder
It is a mixture of sodium pyrophasphate, baking soda and flour. When mixed with water, carbon dioxyde bubbles are given off. It can be replaced by stiffly beaten egg whites which contains plenty if air.

Elbow grease
When you mix the dough forcefully, you trap air bubbles which expand during cooking and swell the cake. You can use an electric mixer with hook or spiral whiskers.

Oven
Heat expands air the bubbles caught in the dough.

Adding tons of baking powder is useless if you do not master the cooking phase 
Cooking

As soon as you add the baking powder, the bubbles of carbon dioxyde (C02) start giving off. That is why you must add it at the end of the preparation.

The cooking phase is quite complex. I will simplify it with this graph: cooking times may change a little according to the recipes.
During the first 10 minutes, the dough is heated and swells little. After 10 min the baking powder nearly stops producing bubbles.
 
From 10 to 15 min, bubbles inflate and start swelling the cake. The dough is still not cooking.
 
From 15 min, a cooked dough crust starts forming on the top of the cake. It is likely to prevent the cake from swelling anymore. You must then increase the oven temperature so that the dough can brust the crust.

From 20 to 30 min, the dough swells fast pushing the crust and starts cooking inside. It is in your interest to extend this phase as much as you can because the swelling is maximum during this phase.

After 30 min, you must diminish the temperature to avoid burning on the top. The cake finishes cooking inside and swells little.

How to control this temperature?

With a big oven, just set the thermostat to 200°C for the 30 first minutes then set it down to 150°C.

With a small oven, the temperature grows faster. You must slow this growth down using 5 min steps as shown in the brownies or marble-cake recipe.

After cooking

Get the caje out of the oven. If you let it cool down in the oven, it swells down. The cake is hot and soft. It flattens easily. It is better to let it cool down in its can so that it does not flatten too much.

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