It doesn’t matter what you do or who you are.” “The biggest lie is that if you have everything at room temperature, you’re fine,” Susan says. Susan’s simple trick to prevent curdled cake batterĪvoiding curdled cake batter starts with using room temperature ingredients, but that’s not necessarily a guarantee of success. This affects the baked cake - and not in a good way.” The result is a coarser, less even crumb. With a broken batter, she explains that you could “get little chunks of butter that stay whole when they go into the oven. You want the final texture of your cake to have a “fine grain and not too many bubbles,” says King Arthur recipe tester Melanie Wanders. When this happens, your cake batter will look lumpy and curdled, rather than smooth and even. And sometimes, there’s simply too much water in the mixture and not enough fat to hold it, no matter how careful you are. Or if you rush while beating in the eggs, the emulsion won’t be stable enough to hold in place. This can happen for several reasons: If your eggs are just slightly too cold, they may cause the soft butter to seize up, breaking the emulsion. The emulsion breaks when the fat can no longer hold the water. But that suspension is delicate - remember, fat and water don’t want to be together, and they’re always looking for an excuse to bolt away from each other. When cake batter is made properly, it forms a stabilized matrix of suspended fat, water, and air to create a smooth, velvety batter. Many (but not all) butter-based cakes call for you to cream butter and sugar, add eggs, then follow with dry ingredients and milk. Since water and fat don’t naturally get along, this process is done slowly, adding eggs one at a time and waiting until they’re completely mixed - and the water and fat have blended - before trying to force in more water by adding another egg. In some butter-based cakes, eggs (which contain water) are added to creamed butter and sugar (which is mostly fat) to create what Susan refers to as a “reverse emulsion” - water suspended in fat, rather than the opposite. This is basically the whole point of emulsions: taking these two incompatible substances and making them come together happily, like a culinary Pride and Prejudice. But think about what happens if you mix oil and water - they stay separate, because they don’t want to blend. Most emulsions we encounter are a suspension of fat in water. And that starts with understanding the base of your batter: emulsions.
I GET THE CAKE GOT A BUNCH PROFESSIONAL
So how do you prevent it from happening? Longtime King Arthur baker and former professional pastry chef Susan Reid has a handy trick up her sleeve.īut first, it’s important to know why this unsightly disaster strikes. (Expect all the m oans and groans.Have you ever blissfully started baking a cake … until suddenly you look down and your beautiful batter has turned into a lumpy, curdled mess?Ī broken batter isn’t what you want while baking.
Don't worry, chocolate dessert lovers: We've got you covered, too. It's that easy.Īhead, find our all-time favorite sheet cake recipes, including tried-and-true spring cakes, carrot sheet cakes, peanut butter sheet cakes, and so much more. Just pour the batter into a pan, smooth out the surface, bake, and decorate. Our personal favorite thing about sheet cakes, though, is the fact that they're so, so easy to make. Whether you need a strawberry dessert to serve at a midsummer birthday party or a more classic cake recipe for a tailgate, odds are, a sheet cake's the way to go. why have these larger-than-life, serve-everyone-in-the-neighborhood cakes seen so much success, you ask? Well, their size is a big piece of it: They really are the ideal type of cake for feeding a crowd. "God bless my mother-in-law, who shared the recipe with me when I became engaged to her son," Ree says of one particularly beloved recipe that, approximately 100 percent of the time, causes "moans and groans from anyone who takes a bite." (Long-time readers, take note: It's her chocolate sheet cake, and it's first on this list of recipes.)īut. There's a reason sheet cake recipes have stood the test of time-and we're not just talking about Ree Drummond's sheet cakes, although those are sinfully good in and of themselves.
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