Baking Problems
Answers to Common Baking Problems
Baking problems can change a pleasant afternoon in the kitchen into a long evening's chore. Here are some problems and their solutions.
If you are baking cookies and find that your handiworks look more like clusters than settling into cookie-shapes, your problem could be that you are using pastry flour instead of all-purpose flour. The pastry flour is a stiffer flour, and causes the cookies to maintain their shape instead of spreading out as cookies normally do.
If your cakes turn out fine on the top and in the middle but soggy on the bottom, what could cause this testiest of baking problems? Try a better quality baking pan, on a lower shelf in the oven, and get – and use – a good quality oven thermometer. This should even out the temperatures.
Another one of the baking problems you may have is that, when baking bread, the dough doesn't cook all the way through. Usually this is caused by your not setting the oven temperature high enough, or not leaving the dough in for a long enough period of time, or both. Adjusting one or the other should make for a more evenly baked loaf.
Sometimes you may find that the texture of your cookies or cakes isn't “right”. This can be caused by using the wrong ingredients, or using too much or too little of one or more of the ingredients. It's a good idea to double-check the ingredients from the recipe while you're mixing your dough, to make sure you have the right amounts mixed in.
Sometimes a baked good will turn out flat instead of rising as it should. This is actually one of the more common of baking problems, and generally occurs because you haven't used enough leavening, or perhaps you didn't put in the right type of leavening that the recipe called for.
Once in awhile, the texture of your dough may be “tough”, or not as smooth as it should be. This is usually caused by over-mixing the ingredients. Don't make any more work for yourself than you have to. If the recipe just wants the ingredients mixed, you don't need to over-mix.
Once in awhile, a cake in the oven may “deflate” when you are checking on it. This isn't one of the more common of the baking problems we see, but it does happen. Generally this is caused by having the oven open for too long while you're checking your masterpiece, and the temperature falls.
If you have baked a cake and used Splenda instead of sugar, you may find that the cake has a strong aftertaste. This is due to the difference in the “strength” of splenda versus sugar. If you want to use splenda to bake with, it is generally recommended that you only use half as much splenda as you would use sugar. This should fix it.
There are as many baking problems as there are bakers, but when you run into one, it's helpful to be able to diagnose it and correct it. I hope this article helped you!