Last night made a cake. using the DH yellow butter golden. Put sourcream and instant pudding plus 4 large eggs. welll i had to throw the cake away.

it looked great and was cooked but when my sister cut into it the sides were nice and moist but the entire middle was a pure pudding.

can anyone tell em what caused this. I used the White almond sour cream recipe but just different flavors. HELP!!

did you test for doneness with a toothpick to the middle?

how hot was the oven...sounds like too hot. turn oven down to 325 so center has time to cook w/out edges overcooking

also might try using bake even strips or a damp towel folded and wrapped around the outside of pan to let center cook w/out overcooked edges

Yes. I did test for doneness and i used the damp towel. even had the oven turned down. i don't know if using the sourcream and the pudding together made it turn out this way?

Oh i can't believe i wasted all those ingredients I really don't know what went wrong..

It really sounds like a lot of moisture in the cake. I would do it with either the s.c. or the pudding, but not both.

Also, I don't know if you did this, but when checking for doneness, make sure to check different parts of the cake as one side may come out 'ready' and the other side is not.

I've had problems with using both. For me, one or the other works better alone. That's just my experience. With the White alomond sour cream cake I use a recipe w/o pudding.

Same thing happened to me too. the next time I made it, I made sure I used DH cake mx (no pudding in the mix) and it worked much better. My white sour creme recipe doesn't call for instant pudding.

I would suggest baking it much longer. Have you calibrated your oven? I did and when I did I found out that my oven ranges in temp during the heating time. It goes anywhere from 355 down to 320, back up to 360. I think this increase and decrease in oven temp, messes up some of my cakes, and causes the soft middle. My oven is less than 6 months old by the way.

I know how dissapointing it is to go through all the work and expense of doing a cake, only to have it fall in the middle.

Oh and I also found that I can not bake two layers on the same rack in my oven, I can only bake one layer at a time. Luckily, my old oven is in my basment, so I now cook the other layer in the oven down there.

Hope you figure out what caused yours to be soft in the middle.

Cindy

Although I have never tried this recipe, I have had the same problem with several different cakes - I think it's my oven.

However, and it's just my two cents (and as a Newbie, might not even be worth that much), but I have had much better success using an upside down flower nail in the middle of my cake pan compared to the bake even strips. I tried the nail trick a few weeks ago and now won't bake a cake without using one.

Good luck!

Sarah

Dagnabit, I took this book out of the library a couple weeks ago and it was like a cake bible of some kind- this woman -i'll try and find the name of it and her- was like queen bee of cakes, studied them, all over the world, taught, baked for years and years- really insightful- talks about calibrating ovens, and the science behind leavening and reactions between ingredients, and explains how things react and why so you know when something turns out one way, you understand the process yadda yadda yadda;- a bit over my head some of it because of lack of hands on experience- but valuable info- I swore I wrote down the name cause it's something I'd be looking for to buy secondhand- good to have in the library

lol, doing a library search (nope it's not 'curious george bakes a cake' LOL)

lol @ patty cake patty cake mother goose rhymes

some kind of cake bible, anyway I'll find it- it's fairly old- like 20 years maybe

anyway I forgot the point of that - oh well LOL- oh it might have answered your question about why it's not done in the middle when I find the title I shall post it

Yes, Rose's Cake Bible is amazing - truly an invaluable cake resource. She has a great website and a fantastic blogsite. Here are the links:

http://www.thecakebible.com (her website)

http://www.realbakingwithrose.com (her fairly new blogsite ... it is really great!!!!)