Hello everyone.
I am attempting scratch cakes onece again! I grew tired of the taste of doctored mixes... Anyways, one of the things that has always turned me away from scratch baking is how much my cake shrinks after I take it out of the oven. It pulls away from the the edge of the pan between a quarter to half and inch on the top only. Therefore I am left with a cake that looks like an upside down pie. I bake at 325 degrees using strips. Might that be the culprit? Any advice/tips from scratch bakers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Good Morning rdjr...I'm glad to see someone else is having some of the same problems I am. I can't be much help right now, but if I figure it out, I'll post it. Do you use conventional or convection? I just got a new convection from conventional and love it. However, since I was baking the WASC at 325 and had to start reducing because of the old oven began overheating, I reduced the temp to 300 because I tried the first cake at 325 and it basically boiled over the pan. Although, I did discover that the rack numbering starts at the bottom and not the top. I'm a little afraid to bump the temp back up to 325 now that I've got the racks in the proper positions. But I might have to take the leap again. I've been trying different scratch recipes. I've even made up a substitute cake mix in place of the box mixes and tried that. Had basically the same result with all, a much thicker, spoon to pan batter instead of pouring, a very, very tight crumb, tasted good, but felt like I was eating one of those big fat, chocking French fries. So far, I've not gone back and tried the original recipe I was using because I've come to realize that the recent changes to the cake mixes, somewhere around January 1 and before I'm sure, have caused blowouts, as I call them, in the sides of my cakes (increased air pockets, I image), and then increased dramatically when my conventional oven started overheating. I would love to hear if you've had any of these problems. Thanks.
If your cake is overbaked it will pull away from the edges of the tin like that so maybe try baking a few minutes less and see if you notice a difference.
My grandma always told me that if the cake started pulling away from the tin before it came out of the oven it had been in there too long. She baked a lot so there must be some reasoning behind it :-)
Hi! I have that same problem when I bake 2" high, 8 - 9" layers.
A little bit of shrinking is normal, but I think what happens is that since the base of the cake is attached to the pan or the parchment, they hold the cake in place and don't allow it to shrink. The top, meanwhile has very little support from the sides of the pan and is able to pull away easily. That's why it shrinks more from the top than the bottom.
It hasn't been a problem for me since I just trim down the sides or fill in the gaps with buttercream, but it would be an issue in a naked cake.
As @bubs1stbirthday said, try decreasing your baking time by just a few minutes, so that you don't have any shrinking inside the oven.
You could try cutting the parchment circle on the base of your cake just a bit smaller than the pan, so the cake has a free edge to shrink. Also take your cake out of the pan as soon as possible, like after 5 minutes of pulling it out of the oven and let it cool on a rack.
If your cake is flat and there is no danger of cracking due to a dome, you could cool the cake upside down once you've taken it out of the pan. You could even remove the parchment circle and let it cool naked. The same would apply to a cake baked without parchment.
I haven't personally tried any of this myself, but I've been meaning to, so please do let me know what works for you. Good luck!
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