New answers tagged cake
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Vinegar and salt. I find these help with raising and the smell and as others said lemon rind or a dash of vanilla
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Have you tried measuring the temperature in the oven? It looks to me as though your oven is too cool. Get an oven thermometer and give it a try. I had a fan oven that didn't fan properly, and my baking didn't rise properly. If I made the same recipe without fan (with 10% more heat) it worked fine.
Have you tried the same recipe in another oven?
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One of the reason could be that you do not whip egg whites or wait too long. You can try to add a spoon of lemon to the egg whites to avoid that.
Another reason is that you need to use yeast.
The cases depend a lot on the type of cake and the recipe followed (yeast is not always necessary).
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This is a very vexing case, I douobt that anybody can tell from looking at your cake. So you will have to troubleshoot it yourself by first trying to bake a successful cake by following a traditional recipe and using best practices, and then, if that cake works well, start changing it back towards your preferred recipe one-by-one and seeing what makes the ...
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Yeast doesn't really give you an alcoholic taste in bread. Little yeast activity doesn't give you much aroma, and high yeast activity gives you a bread-typical aroma based around thiols and even hints of ammonia. If you leave your dough to ferment until you can smell alcohol in it, it is no longer suitable for baking.
As to why you are sensing something ...
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Yeast naturally creates alcohol from the sugars (gluten) found in bread flour. However, this probably won't be enough to leave an 'alcohol' taste, depending on the amount of yeast used and the amount of time the dough is left to leaven. You'll find that sourdough bread has more of that alcohol taste (and is also a lot fluffier) than a quick 2-hour no-knead ...
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Are you at a high altitude?
https://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/icooks/article-3-03.html
Low air pressure has two main effects on baked goods: They will rise
more easily, and lose moisture faster; liquids evaporate more quickly
since water boils at lower temperatures at high altitude. As
leavening occurs faster, gas bubbles tend to coalesce into ...
1
Here are a few more variables not yet mentioned:
oven temperature: Consumer ovens are notoriously inaccurate -- even if you set yours for 350°F, you might actually get 400°F or even higher. Baking at too high a temperature will of course lead to over-baking.
baking powder: Baking powder has a limited shelf life; once you open the can, it starts to absorb ...
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Most recipes want you to put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix, but in my experience, this sets you up for failure. First you want to mix all of the dry ingredients completely Especially when dealing with baking powder.
Baking powder and egg gives you the rise you need in your cake, but if a clump of baking soda doesn't get spread througoht your cake, ...
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Assuming that you ask about the dry product that usually consists of mostly sugar plus vanillin (or if really posh, genuine vanilla), the recommendation is to treat it like sugar and add it together with the other sugar in the recipe.
The total amount is small(ish), so unless you are making something very sensitive and finicky, adding it to the flour won’t ...
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You should use it as the sugar the recipe calls for. In this case, whip it with the eggs and oil. The vanilla in vanilla sugar is for flavoring and does not really alter the sugar.
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Gluten development, leavening, moisture, bake time, and temperature are all very important. But one thing that stands out to me about your recipe is that it has a bit more carrot relative to the sugar and flour. Additions like carrot (or applesauce or banana) don't have any gluten, so they don't contribute to that air-capturing structure. Instead that puree ...
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Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it. It depends a little bit on the ratio of cream to chocolate you're using, but your ganache will turn out fine without adding sugar. If you're only using, say, 2 Oz of chocolate for your whole batch then it's worth adding some sugar to compensate. But if you're making enough to fill or cover something, the reduction in ...
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60% chocolate is roughly the same as semi-sweet chocolate. In most recipes, you can substitute 1oz unsweetened chocolate + 1 Tablespoon granulated white sugar for 1 oz semi-sweet chocolate.
This substitution ratio may not always scale perfectly for baking (ex, 16 oz unsweetened + 1 cup sugar may not be the right substitution for 16 oz semi-sweet in a cake),...
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The protein content of the flour, as @moscafj describes, and the way it is handled are partly responsible for the strength of the gluten network in cakes, breads, etc. But there are other factors that affect gluten development, some of which are very important in the recipe you've provided.
In wheat flour, the proteins (two principle types, glutenins and ...
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You do need some gluten structure formation for the cake to rise and for the dough to trap air as it bakes. You should realize that different flours have different levels of the proteins that work to create these structures. All purpose flour is generally a mixture that provides a protein content for most applications. Think of it as your "average" flour (...
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Gluten development is not something you need for a cake to rise, excess gluten development in a cake leads to a tough cake, dense cakes are usually caused by a different reason. With a carrot cake my first thoughts would be:
Too much moisture: carrot and other vegetable cakes can get very wet due to the moisture in the vegetables added, an overly wet batter ...
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