Tried Dorie Greenspan Perfect Party cake to make the Wilton soccer cake pan. I bake the cake between 160 and 175 and both times it did not rise well in middle and cake became very brown and dry on the outside because of how long it had to bake. I think the soccer pan is deep. It holds the entire recipe at once so I need to bake 2 times the recipe to get the two halves to put together to create the sphere. I want a moist light cake not heavy and dense, but it needs to be able to stack on top of each other and cover with fondant, without weighing the cake down.

Made the cake with Yellow Chiffon cake but was so light and tender the top half weighed down the base and created a weird not very round cake.

Any suggestion as to what I am doing wrong? Could I be over mixing? I used whole milk instead of buttermilk could that be the problem. We do not have buttermilk here. I need to bake cake in a few hours and decorate for Saturday.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Hi,

If your recipe calls for baking soda and you replaced buttermilk with regular milk, then you took the acid out of your recipe that is needed to activate the leavener and the cake will not fully rise. Next time, add some lemon juice to your milk...that will turn it into the equivalent of buttermilk.

Also, those shaped molds (especially Wilton brand) are so thin that they tend to cause cakes to over-bake on the outside and under-bake on the inside due to poor heat retention. I use a proper half sphere mold for things like soccer balls along with a heating core, which helps alleviate that crust-on-the-outside problem.

Hope this helps! Good luck with your cake. Cheers,
Kristen

I just made a soccer ball cake using the wilton sports pan. I used a doctored chocolate cake mix from a recipe I found on Cake Central (devils food cake with the addition of sour cream) worked perfectly!