All-New Cake Mix Doctor - Anne Byrn [14]
1. There should be spring in the texture of the cake. I press lightly with my fingertips on the center of the cake. When done, the cake should spring back and not leave an indentation.
2. Vanilla and yellow cakes should be golden in color, and chocolate cakes should look darker than when they were put in the oven.
3. The cake should just begin to pull away from the side of the pan.
4. The cake should smell done. Train your nose. I can smell a baked chocolate cake the moment I walk in the door.
High-Altitude How-To
Since I’ve never lived at a high altitude it was hard for me to fully understand the frustration felt by cooks who try to bake cakes above 3,500 feet. But, then I visited Denver on book tour and baked cakes with food writer Marty Meitus. In her kitchen I saw firsthand the cake wrecks that can come out of an oven this high above sea level. Bundts didn’t rise as high as I am used to in Nashville. Sheet cakes had big dips in the center. Everything needed frosting as a cover-up!
Before baking in the clouds you need to select your recipe carefully. Bonnie West, a Denver home economist, tested recipes for me a while back and came to some conclusions of her own about how to bake well at high altitude. Avoid instant pudding, she said. That goes for both cake mixes with pudding in them, and adding extra pudding mix to a recipe. If you must use a mix with pudding in it, don’t doctor it up, just follow the directions on the package for high altitude baking.
Because there is less air pressure at high altitudes, you need to choose cakes that have good structure. Sugar, peanut butter, and cocoa tenderize cakes and reduce their structure. So do sweetened gelatin, chocolate syrup, and marshmallows. Avoid recipes containing too much of these ingredients because they cause havoc at high heights. And, while cakes need oil, it also reduces the structure of a cake, so you have to cut back on it, for example adding a third of a cup plus a tablespoon instead of the half cup called for in the recipe.
The cake pan really affects baking success at these altitudes. Bundts are a good choice, giving the batter something to cling to even if the cakes don’t bake as tall as they might at sea level. Long rectangular cakes do not bake well. Layers need to be at least nine inches in diameter—anything smaller and the batter will flow over the side of the pan.
Again, read the high altitude directions on the side of the cake mix box and apply them to my recipes. In addition, here are my basic rules for high-altitude baking.
• Add a little flour (two tablespoons to layers, up to a quarter of a cup for Bundts) to increase the batter weight and keep the cake from rising too quickly and then falling. In addition, add one tablespoon more liquid for layers and two tablespoons more for Bundts.
• Set the oven 25°F higher than the recipe calls for because this higher temperature makes batter set more quickly. Then it won’t rise and overflow the pan.
• Blend the batter well with a mixer, beating for at least three minutes to build structure.
• Prep the pan well. Grease and flour the pan because cakes at these heights tend to stick.
• Don’t worry if the cake cracks. The air is dry at high altitudes. Try and bake on a humid day, says Bonnie West. Interestingly most of the e-mails I have received about high altitude baking have been from readers who used to live in Florida and other places closer to sea level who can’t make their favorite recipes work in the mountains. Cover the dips and cracks with frosting.
• Don’t overbake the cake. A dry cake tastes worse than a moist cake that falls flat.
• Relax. Don’t take high altitude too seriously, says Bonnie. You can also do as Barbara Lyons of Denver does. She bakes cakes in her seven-cup electric rice cooker. She uses half a box of cake mix and half of the add-in ingredients, greases the removable bowl, lines it with a circle of parchment paper, and greases the parchment. She pours in the batter and bakes the cake in the cooker with the