Baking a cake may sound like a piece of cake but did you know that a little oven temperature mistake can ruin your cake completely? Indeed, the final shape of your cake is not when you make it but when it is baking in the oven. To ensure that your cake come out right, you need to set the oven to the recommended temperature so that the cake mixture can rise and bake to its proper shape.
Setting the proper oven temperature is really important. Make sure that you set the oven at the right temperature so that your cake will come out just like what the recipe promise. You should also make sure that you bake the cake at the recommended temperature and shelf position because the heat will not only expands the gas produced by the raising agents, but also caramelize the surface sugar and thus giving it a soft brown crust.
Higher temperature will speed up the cooking time but your cake will not be baked correctly because it won’t be able to rise in time. A cake is usually cooked from the sides first and eventually the centre. By speeding up the cooking time, your cake will have a cracked peak in the centre and any fruit in the cake will eventually sink below. On closer examination, you will notice that only the outside of the cake is cooked but the inside is still raw.
If you set the temperature too low, you will experience the same baking problem too. The raising agents might work at low temperature but your cake will not rise at all and will collapse and sink in the middle as a result of insufficient heat. In the end, you will get a sunken cake with hard, sugary crust.
As a golden rule, the smaller the cake you want to bake, the hotter the oven should be. Smaller cakes should also be baked in the top shelves where it is the hottest. Larger cakes will require less temperature and slower cooking so they should be baked on the middle or lower shelves. So the next time you bake a cake, make sure you take its size into consideration and place them in the proper shelves.
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