The why behind the what
Baking guides
Short reads on the parts of baking that go wrong. No history of the Victoria sponge, no twelve-hundred words before the method.
- Troubleshooting · 6 min readWhy is my cake raw in the middle?Brown outside, wet batter in the centre. The oven ran hot for the depth of the cake, or it came out too soon. Here is how to tell which, and how to rescue the one on your worktop.
- Technique · 7 min readHow to make a cake more moistTake it out of the oven earlier, swap part of the butter for oil, keep the sugar, and stop mixing when the flour disappears. Adding more milk, the fix most people try first, makes a flatter cake, not a moister one.
- Troubleshooting · 8 min readWhy did my cake sink in the middle?It came out of the oven before the middle had set, or it rose faster than it could hold itself up. The shape of the dip says which, and each cause has its own fix.
- Technique · 7 min readCake tin sizes, and how to convert any recipeTins scale by area, not width, which is why a 23 cm tin gives a flat cake from a 20 cm recipe. The table, the arithmetic, and a real recipe converted both ways.
- Technique · 7 min readHow to make salted caramel that never seizesSugar melted on its own to dark amber, then butter, warm cream and salt off the heat. The three things that go wrong, and the fix for each, in the order they happen.
The Sunday slice