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    Home » Baking science

    Published on: March 10, 2016 by Janice; Updated on: December 14, 2022 15 Comments

    Why do cakes sink?

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    Did you bake a cake only to discover the cake collapsed in the oven? Or maybe your cakes sink when you take them out of the oven? Find out why cakes sink and what you can do (or not do) to stop cake collapse.

    Jump to:
    • What causes a cake to sink?
    • How to avoid cake collapse and cake sinking as they cool?
    • Final thoughts

    What causes a cake to sink?

    The cake collapses because your oven isn't hot enough or your cake is under-baked

    Your cakes may collapse if your oven temperature is too low. I always keep an oven thermometer in my oven to make sure that my oven is properly preheated before I put cakes in to bake.

    The oven thermometer never leaves my oven. I shift it from one rack to another, as needed, but I rely on the thermometer to tell me what temperature my oven is. This Rubbermaid thermometer on Amazon is under $10!

    The heat of the oven is vital for encouraging baking powder to react so your cakes rise but also for the structure of the cake to set. If there's not enough heat to set the crust and the crumb inside, the cake may rise and fall.

    Freshly baked bundt cake still in the cake pan

    Furthermore, if you didn't leave your cake to bake for long enough, your cakes will also sink. For butter cakes, like this vanilla butter cake, I look for certain signs before I remove them from the oven. Here are a few ways to check if your cake is done baking:

    1. the skewer test: I poke the centre of the cake with a cake tester (like this one from Amazon) to see if it's still wet inside. If the tester comes out clean, the cake should be done (although some cakes are sneaky and may pass the skewer test but still require more oven time... that's a whole other story).
    2. the edges: I look at the edges of the cake, which should be nicely golden brown all around, especially in the area closest to the pan. The edges of the cake should have pulled away from the sides of the pan, a telltale sign the cake is baked through.
    3. the tap test: I give the top of the cake a light, gentle tap/poke with my hand. It should feel a little bouncy and possibly even spring back. If you press the cake and it makes a dent and it feels very "delicate" in an unset/wet cake kind of way. The cake isn't done. It's hard to explain, but when you press a cake that's not totally baked through and then you press it again when it's properly baked, you will feel that when the cake is cooked, it takes on a certain firmness and strength, though very delicate.
    4. the temperature: use an instant read thermometer like the Thermapen or the Thermoworks ThermoPop to measure the internal temperature of your cake. When it's done baking, it should read 100 ºC or 212 ºF. 

    Levelled cake | Janice Lawandi @ kitchenhealssoul

    The cake sinks because it lacks structure

    If you don't include enough structure-building ingredients in your recipe, the cake may collapse on itself. As the cake bakes, pushed upwards in the pan from carbon dioxide and steam, the cake needs support to maintain that volume and to set the height in place. If not, the cake will collapse on itself. This can even happen in the oven. There are a couple reasons a cake can lack enough support.

    1. not enough gluten: I've noticed this from playing around with gluten-free cake recipes especially. Gluten plays an important structural role, even in cakes. And so, when I develop gluten-free cake recipes, if I don't add a structure-providing ingredient, like extra egg, some xanthan gum or even ground chia/flax to compensate for the lack of gluten, the cake collapses on itself. This can even happen in the oven, before it's done baking (particularly tragic!). The cake can't support all that air and height and it falls, leading to a sunken, sometimes greasy cake that isn't very tasty or appetizing. I wrote about the process of developing a gluten-free cake made from mashed potatoes.
    2. not enough eggs, particularly the egg whites: Eggs provide structure and support to a cake as it bakes. The proteins in eggs coagulate and help contribute to the set of the cake, allowing your cakes to hold on to the height achieved in the oven. Not enough egg means not enough coagulation, and therefore not enough structure.
    • Thermoworks DOT probe thermometer
    • Thermoworks Thermapen Mk4
    • Thermoworks ThermoPop

    Too much of an ingredient can cause a cake to collapse

    This relates to a lack of structure too, but if your ingredient ratio in your recipe is off, and there's too much of a certain ingredient, this can be quite disastrous because the recipe has too much of that something and not enough structure to hold it all together. The main culprits in this case are:

    1. too much fat: fat adds extra tenderness to a cake, sure, but too much tenderness comes with a lack of structure and collapsing. You have to find the right balance between tenderness from fat and structure.
    2. too much sugar: again, if that sugar is not balanced out with more eggs or more flour in your recipe, you're going to have a collapsed cake, and also a crumbly cake from lack of structure.
    3. too much leavener (baking powder or baking soda): think about it, the more leavener you have, the more gas will form inside the cake, and if there isn't a growing structure to support all that extra gas, the gas will escape. The cake will rise up and then collapse back down. Remember when I did the experiment to show the impact of too much baking soda? The cakes made with less baking soda rose far more. In retrospect, that was probably because the cakes with more leavener rose and collapsed, and also because the pH affects the structural proteins, preventing them from assembling.
    4. too much liquid: again, extra liquid has to come with extra structure, or else there could be trouble.

    Essentially, too much of certain ingredients (fat, sugar, leavening agent, liquid) can lead to cake collapse, while not enough of other ingredients (eggs and flour) can also lead to cake collapse. It's so important to properly measure ingredients for baking, but also to bake from reliable recipes that have been tested.

    Taking a cake out of the oven before it's baked through is also to blame. Are there any other reasons I might have missed that you can think of?

    Measuring collapse of dropped cake | Janice Lawandi @ kitchenhealssoul

    How to avoid cake collapse and cake sinking as they cool?

    Knowing how to test when a cake is done baking is essential to successful baking and to avoid cake collapse. It seems obvious but, if you are baking a recipe that you are familiar with and have successfully tested before, your cake sank simply because it wasn't baked enough or because you skipped a step, an ingredient, or maybe you added too much of something. It happens. 

    If you are baking a new recipe that you aren't familiar with, perhaps there's a typo in the recipe that the author didn't catch and some ingredient is missing (or perhaps too much of an ingredient was listed by accident). This also happens a lot.

    Whipping egg whites to stiff, glossy peaks like a pillowy meringue

    For Angel food cakes, cool the cake upside down

    There is a trick to prevent sponge cakes like Angel food cakes from sinking: cool these cakes upside down! By cooling the cake upside down, the cake has plenty of room to stretch out of the pan, instead of collapsing into the bottom of the pan.

    Cooling certain sponge cakes upside down leads to a taller cake and a lighter texture. But this only works for sponge cakes baked in ungreased pans/unfloured pans because these cakes stick to the sides of pan. A regular vanilla cake would fall right out of the cake pan if cooled upside down because of the nature of the cake and the way the cake pan is prepared before baking.  

    Golden brown banana bread on a vintage wood cutting board with painted green trim

    A science theory about cake collapse:

    You might recall, in my post about the best baking and baking science books, I mentioned reading, in "The Science of Cooking," (available on Amazon) that Peter Barham claims to prevent a cake from collapsing as it cools, you have to drop it on the counter. He writes that cakes collapse as they cool because steam condenses in the cake bubbles. 

    The cake bubbles shrink because air can't get into those cake bubbles to replace the volume lost. Shrinking bubbles means shrinking cake, basically, and the shrinking occurs most towards the middle of the cake because the centre of the cake is softer, while the crust is too dry and stiff to contract.

    Barham goes on to offer a way of preventing cake collapse, specifically stating that "Dropping the cake, from a height of about 30 cm on to a hard surface, passes a shock through the bubble walls and allows some of them to break, converting the cake from a closed to an open cell structure. Now air is able to get into the broken bubbles and the cake will not collapse."

    Obviously, I had to test this to see for myself.

    Cake collapse experiment:

    I made my go-to vanilla cake recipe (that I've modified to make the cardamom cranberry cake and the Earl Grey cake), which happens to make 3 layers of cake. This way I could have my control sample, which is a cake that goes straight from oven to cooling rack without any jostling or dropping, and then 2 cakes that I drop immediately after removing from the oven. Fun times, I tell you!

    I used straws and a Sharpie marker to mark the heights of the cake, immediately after baking, and then after cooling. Then I measured the change in height. All the cakes lost a little height upon cooling, but go figure, the cake that wasn't dropped shrank the least (about 1–2 mm), while the dropped cakes shrank about 3–4 mm.

    Basically, there was more cake collapse observed if I dropped the cakes from a height of 30 cm. That's exactly what I was expecting and the opposite of what Peter Barham claimed. Cakes are fragile when they come out of the oven. It seems pretty logical to me that if you drop a cake when it's most fragile, it will collapse a little from the shock. Right? I made this "quirky" video for you to illustrate my experiment.

    Dropping cakes and cake collapse | Janice Lawandi @ kitchenhealssoul

    Final thoughts

    By the way, looking at the inside of this cake, we see that I had large holes in the cake, but writing this post made me realize a few things: given the big bubbles inside and the spotting that I've been observing on the surface of my cakes (look at the 1st photo of this post again), I'm wondering if I'm working with too much leavener in my cake recipe. I use 2 teaspoon baking powder for 2 cups of flour, but according to some baking references, my recipe might only need ½ teaspoon per cup (therefore 1 teaspoon baking powder for 2 cups of flour).

    This means, my working recipe might possibly have more baking powder than is needed, specifically double. I have also been wondering if I need a touch more milk/wet ingredients in my recipe. Perhaps the batter is a little too thick and this is leading to pockets of air that can't easily be smoothed or tapped out before baking. All that to say: clearly, I need to make more cakes!

    More Baking science

    • Oven rack position
    • The jam setting point and how to determine jam set
    • Baking with yeast
    • Why do we bake at 350 ºF?
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    Comments

    1. Marlene says

      March 11, 2016 at 11:27 am

      I loved this! And you look very scientific and serious as you drop that cake onto the counter. I bet the impact send the cat running from the room!

      So, I have a question/observation (trying to sound scientific -- ha!) ... it looked to me that you dropped the cake from a much greater height than 30 cm (maybe that was just for dramatic purposes in the video and not for the actual experiment? or perhaps I wasn't correctly gauging the height?). Regardless, I find it implausible that dropping a cake can stop it from shrinking ... if anything, I'd expect it to collapse a bit, cakes being delicate creatures.

      I'm going to be sharing your video in my next Urban Cottage Weekend -- it's too good to keep to myself!

      Reply
      • Janice says

        March 11, 2016 at 2:52 pm

        Thanks for your comment Marlene! I don't know if you noticed in my video, but I had a tape measurer standing up on the counter next to me, in an attempt to properly drop the cake from a 30 cm height. I was trying to stick to that, although as I was doing it, I realized it was kinda hard to gauge on my own if I was actually holding the cake up exactly to the right height, even with the tape measurer there.
        Clearly, I need a partner in crime 😉

        Reply
    2. Liliana says

      March 11, 2016 at 11:44 am

      Very interesting post Janice. I always wondered why sometimes my cakes would just collapse when I took them out of the oven. I know I followed the recipes to the letter.

      Great job with the video!

      Reply
      • Janice says

        March 11, 2016 at 2:54 pm

        Liliana, I think it could still be the recipe and not you 😉
        Now that I've been dissecting recipes more, I'm currently questioning my go-to vanilla cake recipe that I've been using for years. I thought it was a good one, but now I think it could use some more work and be better!

        Reply
    3. Julia says

      March 12, 2016 at 12:57 am

      Dropping a cake seems so counterintuitive! I appreciate you sharing your results. My cakes are rather unpredictable. In fact, for birthdays, my family now requires me to use a box mix, since those are generally foolproof. 🙂

      Reply
    4. Olivia @ livforcake says

      March 12, 2016 at 1:22 pm

      You know, I've been curious about this as well! Interesting to see that it actually causes it to collapse more. I love your baking science posts!! I am a bit of a baking nerd myself, so I love to read them. Super informative and I love the video!

      Reply
    5. Isabelle @ Crumb says

      March 14, 2016 at 1:54 pm

      Phew. Glad to hear I don't have to resort to dropping my freshly-baked cakes on the counter to make sure they don't slump. 🙂 The recommendation sounded totally counter-intuitive, but I suppose it was worth a try, given that the hypothesis wasn't entirely outlandish. I do find a good tap *before* the cake goes into the oven definitely helps a lot with air pockets.
      PS: If you need any help with ummm... disposing of your experimental cakes, I'd happily volunteer my services. In the name of science and all that. Obviously.

      Reply
    6. Sue says

      December 09, 2017 at 11:18 am

      For chiffon cakes, I’ve found that if I reduce the speed of the mixer to slow towards the final minutes of the beating of the egg whites, I don’t get big air bubbles in the final product.

      Reply
    7. Jabeve says

      November 21, 2018 at 8:34 pm

      I always drop my cakes from about 18 inches above the counter two or three times before I put them in the oven. This helps to remove the air bubbles and to bake evenly.

      Reply
    8. Tess Garraway says

      January 28, 2019 at 7:23 am

      I once saw a chap on telly showing how to drop a cake onto the counter after baking. I recall this was to make it more ‘even’ and ‘spongy’.
      Cakes are naturally going to shrink after the heat is taken away, so I expect shrinkage anyway since cold condensed.
      I like your experiments, but I’m still going to stick up for the science involved. Perhaps you’re crater like cake may have been evened by the drop? I’ve had sponges look rather careful too.
      But I do do the drop now. As a matter of choice and course. I get a sponges result!

      Reply
    9. Jairoop says

      June 28, 2019 at 7:54 am

      Hi Janice, Thank you for this post! I love to bake from the "science- based" angle too and this seems like home 🙂
      I was just curious to know if you have experimented with vegan cake recipes. I have been trying a lot of recipes to make the perfect fluffy sponge cake, but something seems amiss, the fluff isn't happening!!
      I would love to hear from you about this.

      Reply
      • Janice says

        June 28, 2019 at 2:59 pm

        Hi! So glad you enjoyed this post. I'm not a vegan baker but I would look into baking with aqua faba as an egg replacement if you want to make a fluffy sponge cake, which depends on eggs for leavening.

        Reply
    10. Bell says

      August 24, 2020 at 3:12 pm

      What about my favourite Jogurt cake? It collapses also!

      Reply
    11. Jennifer says

      March 27, 2022 at 10:25 pm

      In culinary school I was taught to drop the cakes prior to putting them into the oven (to help get rid of air bubbles in the batter prior to baking).

      Reply
      • Janice says

        March 28, 2022 at 10:45 am

        Yes! Me too! Either to bang the pan with cake batter or to swirl it on the counter before putting the pan in the oven. But the suggestion in the book was to drop the baked cake in the pan on the counter AFTER baking, which I still think is counterintuitive and doesn't seem to yield the result the author claims.

        Reply

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