Baking can be pretty simple and straightforward, but if you drop the ball on a step or misread a certain ingredient, then things can quickly go awry. Mistakes can happen at any stage of the baking process, which annoyingly won’t be noticed until the cake comes out of the oven. And even more annoyingly, there aren’t many things you can do to salvage your baked confectionery if it does go wrong.
The main goal is to learn from your mistakes and understand what went wrong so that it isn’t repeated again in the future. There are so many great cake baking tips online that can help perfect your baking process and leave you with some good-quality baked goods.
Here are some of the most common mistakes and fails that can leave your cake looking and tasting a bit worse for wear, and how you can avoid them from happening again.
- Making too many substitutions
The biggest cake-baking mistake is not accurately following the recipe. Deciding to use less or more of a certain ingredient, or substituting it for something very similar isn’t too much of an issue. However, if your cake turns out weird, it will be very difficult to know whether that happened because of the ingredients or your mixing method. So, one of the best cake baking practices out there is to follow the recipe exactly how it is written and suggested, to avoid a major cake fail.
- Not accurately weighing the flour
The next biggest baking mistake is failing to measure the flour accurately. This can be the recipe’s fault more than your own one as there are several recipes out there that list the measurements of flour in cups rather than in weight. This is an extremely inaccurate way to measure flour as scoping a measuring cup into a bag of flour can result in up to 30% extra flour than what a cup actually is. This extra amount of flour can have a negative effect on the final result and you can end up with a dry, hard, and crumbly cake. A good way to avoid this is weighing out 130 grams of flour for every cup that is listed in the recipe. Using a scale is a lot more accurate than a measuring cup and can help in avoiding a major cake fail. Weighing your flour rather than scooping it out of a large bag of flour can also result in less mess!
- Improperly mixing your ingredients together
This is another baking mistake that can easily happen if your recipe provides very vague or ambiguous instructions. This can be common in blended cakes such as carrot cake. In most cases, you will be using a creaming method to bake your cake, which requires combining the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. This is perfected through practice, and the fastest way to gain enough experience is by baking more and more. Over time you will master the technique and avoid any cake blunders or fails in the future.