Help! It was my Dad's Birthday today and I made 3 white cakes and none of them rose enough. I just don't understand why?! i can a good carrot cake rises nice and big but not a white one! Does anyone have any suggestions, please?

-- Megan Milliken (millikenfarm@altavista.com), October 06, 2000

Answers

Lynn had that problem with our sons cake and made two that didn't rise enough , but were a nice texture. We made it into a layer cake instead of a sheet. You can check out Berkeley U. recipe site at http://soar.berkeley.edu/recipes/

This site has over 67000 recipes.

-- Jay Blair (jayblair678@yahoo.com), October 08, 2000.

Well, Happy Belated Birthday to your Dad. Cakes not rising-Did you cream the shortening well? Add baking soda/powder in the right amount? Did you jar the cakes while baking? If the egg whites needed to be whipped did you do that long enough but not too long? Did you incorporate the whites carefully into the batter? Was the oven preheated? (Cakes and breads you do need to preheat, depending on your oven it may be 10 minutes or more) Is the thermostat of your oven working properly? If this is a hand copied recipe, is it correct? (Printed recipes could also have typos, find another recipe to try). And one of my favorites, if someone gave the the recipe, did they purposely cobble it? Did you bake in the proper pan? Greased or ungreased-depending on the type of cake it can make a tremendous difference. The color, finish, and material of the pan can also make a difference.

I don't know if your cakes rose and then fell, or crusted too soon and couldn't rise at all. Get a thermometer and check your oven temp. Find another recipe, even from a beginning cook's cookbook that gives a full description of the steps for the type of cake you're trying to bake and keep trying. Even I can bake, so there isn't anything mysterious about it. Besides, the dogs will eat almost anything. Gerbil

-- Gerbil (ima_gerbil@hotmail.com), October 08, 2000.

Well one thing no one mentioned so far is that baking powder eventually loses its potency. It reacts with moisture, even moisture in the air, and in my humble experience at least, there's no way you can use up an entire container of baking powder before it loses its effectiveness, unless of course you bake an awful lot.

-- Leslie A. (lesliea@home.com), October 13, 2000.