Cakes & Sponges
Why the oven door stays shut for the first two thirds of a bake
Opening the door drops the oven temperature by a large margin in seconds, and a cake whose structure has not yet set has nothing to…
Cakes & Sponges
Crumb, rise and the mixing methods that decide both.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 2 of 2
Cakes & Sponges
The all-in-one method works because the fat is soft and the flour is weak
Putting everything in the bowl and beating it briefly breaks most of the rules of cake making, and it produces a perfectly good…
Cakes & Sponges
Acid in a cake batter is doing three jobs at once
Buttermilk, treacle, yoghurt and brown sugar are not there only for flavour, and swapping them out changes rise, colour and texture…
Cakes & Sponges
Natural and alkalised cocoa are not the same ingredient
The two tins look identical on the shelf and behave differently in the bowl, because one of them is acidic and the other has had…
Cakes & Sponges
A rolled sponge cracks because the starch set before you rolled it
The instruction to roll a thin sponge while it is still warm is not tradition, and it is describing a window that closes as the…
Cakes & Sponges
A baked cheesecake is a custard in a tin, and it cracks for custard reasons
Treating it as a cake leads to the usual cake instincts, and almost all of them are wrong for a mixture whose structure is set egg…
Cakes & Sponges
Soaking syrups do not add moisture so much as slow its exit
Brushing a sponge with syrup is usually described as adding moisture, and what it mostly does is change how much the cake loses…
Cakes & Sponges
A heavy fruit cake needs a slow oven and a lined tin for the same reason
Both are answers to one problem, which is that the outside of a dense cake reaches setting temperature long before the middle knows…
Cakes & Sponges
Melted butter is a third path, and it lifts nothing on its own
A cake made with melted butter is neither a creamed cake nor an oil cake, and understanding what it gave up explains where its lift…