Sunken Cake Center in 9 x 13 Pan

[mache]

I have a cake recipe that results in a minor sunken area in the center of its 9 x 13 pan. It has great flavor and crumb and the center is level and a cake tester comes out clean when I remove it from the oven. I bake it for 70 minutes at 325 degrees F on an unglazed 13 x 13 garden tile using a moistened magic cake strip. I use 2.25 teaspoons of baking powder.

I could use some help on how to resolve the problem. Here is what I know:

Baking the cake longer results in unacceptable browning and drying out of the cake's perimeter.

Over beating the batter eliminates the sunken center but makes the cake breadier due to increased developed gluten.

My choices are:

1. Lower the temperature to 300 degrees F and bake the cake longer hoping that it will not brown or dry out.

2. Increase the baking powder to 2.5 teaspoons and leave time and temperature unchanged.

Any ideas on how to fix this problem?

-- Mache

[rajoress]

If if you want to try to bake the cake longer and are worried about overbaking at the edges, you could try baking with a couple of flower nails in the middle to disperse the middle heat. I've used these with great success on 12" cakes.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Cake/flower nails, all the way. I just got through baking 20 large (14" square and 14" round) cakes of various flavours, and the nails in the center of the pan work wonders to conduct heat up the center at the same rate it's coming from the sides. For a 14" square, I use 4 nails, and for the round I use 3.

[mache]

Where are the best Internet suppliers for flat bottomed flower nails?

-- Mache

[JeanneCake]

What happens when you reduce the baking powder? Try it with 2 tsp instead of 2.25 and see if this makes a difference. Most cakes fall because of a weak structure due to too much leavening.....

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Mache, you should be able to find them at any cake decorating shop in San Francisco - they're a pretty standard item. If I could find them down here in Ambato, Ecuador (at the cake decorating shop, incidentally) then you, in a major metropolis, should have zero problems.

Jeanne makes an excellent point as well - try reducing your leavening a bit and see if that firms up the cake structure.

[LindaK]

I've never, ever heard of cake/flower nails. I can easily imagine how such a thing would help heat conduction. But how do you use them, exactly?

I love stumbling across something completely new, even when it makes me feel completely ignorant.

[mache]

A flower nail is a sharpened metal rod attached to a flat head. Stood on its head on the bottom of the cake pan and surrounded by batter, heat is conducted from the pan bottom up through the metal and directly into the batter. In my case, placed in the center of the 9 x 13 pan, it would conduct heat to that portion of the batter that is furthest from the pan sides and taking the longest time to cook.

It is also used as a base for icing-based floral patterns. The patterns are created on the head and then attached to the cake with the sharpened metal rod.

-- Mache

[janeer]

Have you tried baking it without the tile?

[mache]

I would think that removing the tile would make the sunken area that much larger. In my opinion, I would lose the direct heat source hitting the bottom of the pan and be more dependent on heat moving from the perimeter of the pan to its interior. Do you have a different opinion?

-- Mache

[Lisa Shock]

What kind of cake is this? Seventy minutes is a really, really long time to bake a cake.

[mache]

Traditional Jewish Honey Cake

I found out how to solve the problem. This recipe is from Marcy Goldman's A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking. The original recipe is here and a discussion about sunken centers is here. As has been suggested, while I reduced the baking powder and the oven temperature from the original recipe due to the use of a 9 x 13 pan rather than loaf pans, its still too much. I should reduce it further and perhaps can bake the cake at its original 350 degrees F. I will lower the baking powder by 1/4 teaspoons until I get a good result.

Thanks to all for your thoughtful comments.

-- Mache

[Panaderia Canadiense]

The other option is to divide the batter and bake it in two layers of equal size - that should reduce the overall baking time and prevent cave-ins.

[mache]

Agreed, but I only want to have to prep and wash one pan.

-- Mache

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Fair enough - I'm the other way on: I'd rather prep and wash two pans and be assured of level, evenly cooked cake, than alter my recipe drastically and hope for the best. I've done enough trial and error to adapt my recipes for altitude that I'm loath to dick about with them anymore, and I'm almost certain that's not your experience. However, given the expense of some of the ingredients in that recipe (I'm not sure how much honey costs in SF, but down here it's about $3 per 250 mL), maybe ask yourself how many times you want to make it before you get it right.....

[mache]

For now its just a puzzle that I want to figure out. If I go slow, even if things do not work it will all be eaten.

I get my honey at Costco for around $12.99 USD for 5 pounds

Costco also has bulk honey 40 pounds for $144.49 USD

-- Mache

[rajoress]

Good luck - that honey cake looks beautiful! We make ours in a loaf pan and it does bake for about an hour at 350. (and I also got the big jug of honey at Costco for honey cakes!)

[mache]

Thanks.

Because Honey Cake is a cultural touchstone, I am one of those people that was forced to eat hideously dry, bready, Honey Cake for my entire life. When I found this recipe, it was a revelation to me that such a cultural icon could also have great culinary merit. In my experience, that has not often been the case.

[KennethT]

I'm not an expert baker by any means - I actually do very little baking - but I seem to remember cooling certain types of cakes with lots of leavening (I'm looking at you, angel food cake) upside down. That way, the structure remains as it cools since gravity is not trying to defeat it...

[rajoress]

Traditional jewish honey cake served at Rosh Hashanah has definitely had a bad rap! We make it every year and it usually is the last dessert to go although when people taste it I think they like the nostalgic flavor of it ans are a littel surprised at how good it is! I use my mother's recipe (which tastes a little like date/nut bread without the dates and nuts) but did do a search thru 8 jewish cookbooks this year to see the variations. I found most of them similar except for varying amounts of fat and liquid-which can explain the rubberiness or dryness, IMHO! Most do have coffee which I think is one of the key ingredients. I'm going to check out the book you mention, I don't think we have that in our home library of jewish cookbooks ;-)

[mache]

If you do try this version, I would read the thread I posted earlier which reduced the baking powder from 1 Tablespoon to 1 teaspoon for the loaf pan version.

[mache]

I reread the smitten kitten post and have decided that the next time I do this cake in my 9 x 13 pan I will use 1.5 teaspoons of baking powder and bake at 350 degrees F. Given the garden tile and the magic cake strip, I am assuming it will be done between 45 and 55 minutes.

-- Mache