I am on the hunt for a new base cake recipe and thought I'd try Liz Marek's. Previously Planet Cake's, which I still love but it is just too hard to get ingredients like chocolate where I am currently living, here in Sri Lanka. I've seen people get great results with Liz's recipe so I know it must be something I'm doing. I really want this recipe to work for me because it's got a good list of kitchen staple ingredients - no buttermilk, not a lot of chocolate etc. 

I'm a pretty experienced baker but I've tried three times now with the same results. The batter is thick and I can see ribbons drop from the paddle - the consistency looks fine. My cakes rise well during baking but then drop, or deflate. They deflate evenly across the whole surface, but I really want that fluffy, high rise. 

The only things I can think of are - it's very hot and humid here and that's somehow affecting the bake, the recipe doesn't like my BeaterBlade maybe?, the oven temp is too high or too low (no access to oven thermometers here, so it's hard to check), or possibly (but unlikely) that the eggs are a totally different size? 

I have heard great things about Jennifer Bratko's recipe but I did not want to purchase without knowing the ingredients used. It's virtually impossible for me to get things like sour cream here, so I don't want to spend $20 on a book that I might not be able to use. 

Thanks for your help, you lovely bakers! 

It does call for sour cream...

Though, I have substituted unflavored greek yogurt and it worked fine...  

It does also call for buttermilk, but I have substituted coconut and regular milk and it worked fine as well...

I'm not at home with the recipe right now, so I can't recall all of the ingredients...

It is a weight based recipe, so you will need a scale...

Thank you. I prefer weight based recipes because I think there is less room for error. Even for the little things, like a standard Australian tbsp is 20ml not 15 like elsewhere in the world. 

I just can't work out why my cakes keep deflating. 

I exclusively use the artisan cake company vanilla cake as the base for my other flavors 

1. are you using cake flour? This recipe only works with cake flour, the lower protein content has a big impact on the texture of the cake, deflating, a solid dense layer on the bottom of the cake and flatter denser cake all happened to me when I tried to use regular all purpose flour 

2. temperature. room temperature milk / butter /eggs seem to really bater for this cake. not warm! I live in southern California and I cant leave my ingredients out long before the butter is too warm and melty, this makes the cake greasy / flat for some reason 

3. oven temp, I'd really try and get a hand on an oven thermometer, 335 degrees is the gold zone for this cake I've accidentally baked it at 325 and it still turned out but a 350 the results werent as good. 

4. make sure you arent opening the oven at any point during the first lets say 20 minutes of baking, you're letting cool air into the oven, lowering the baking temp on an already low temperature baking cake and it can interrupt the rise and cause the cake to sink, or for their to be a solid layer at the bottom of your cake. Heat activates leavening ingredients, messing with it before your cake "sets" is not wise.