I have a cake recipe called oil cake that has been in my family for a long time. It calls for flour and sugar and to make a well and add egg, buttermilk, cocoa, pinch of salt, cinnamon, and oil. Then add 1 cup of boiled water to which 2 tsps of baking soda have been added. Sometimes I mix it first and then add the water w/ b soda and sometimes I add it all together. My problem is sometimes I have white clumps in the batter and they are still there when the cake is done baking. I can't figure out what the problem is. Is the water too hot? Which is the correct way to add it, before I mix the rest of the ingredients or after? Help I love this cake but sometimes it comes out perfect and other times not. I am at a loss. thanks for the advice
Baking – cake baking problem (white lumps of flour)
bakingbaking-sodaflourfood-science
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Best Answer
How it's supposed to be done
The lump problem is straightforward: your mixing technique is failing.
When you are using a well, you have to sift the flour first. Then you add a little bit of the homogenous liquid. So, you don't pour oil, eggs, etc. into the well, but first get them all into another bowl (including the water), and mix them well, preferably with an electric mixer, until they are very homogenous. Ideally, the eggs will emulsify the oil a bit.
For the actual ingredients mixing, you now pour just a little bit of your eggy mixture into the well, maybe 50 ml. Then you take a spoon or other utensil and start stirring the egg mixture without touching the flour with the spoon. A little bit of flour from the walls of the well will stick to the liquid surface and start sinking in, thickening the liquid. Once it is noticeably thicker than the pure mixture, you add some more of the egg mixture to thin it back, then continue back and forth, thickening the batter with the flour then thinning it, until you are done.
When you feel more comfortable and know well how the flour and liquid acts, you can start carefully spreading some flour from the far side of the flour "volcano hill" (not the well edge) onto the liquid, to get it a bit quicker. But in general, it is a finely tuned skill which you have to learn from experience, by doing it slowly and with concentration. If you impatiently stir too much flour into the liquid, it forms the lumps you described.
A more sensible alternative
This is how to execute the recipe correctly. It is a good, but very long method for even mixing. But frankly, there is no need to use it. Nowadays we have electric mixers, which will mix the flour for you into the liquid ingredients without creating lumps. And we have scales, so we can weigh the ingredients. So the second advantage of the well method - you stop mixing the moment the batter has the right consistency (which is necessary when you cannot measure the flour, or don't have a written recipe and are playing it by feeling) - is also moot. If you don't want to spend half an hour mixing your cake batter by your grandma's way, just emulsify the liquid ingredients with the mixer, then slowly add the sifted flour with the mixer turned on on low speed, and stop the moment it's mixed in. That's it.
Water temperature and boiling
As for the water, I see no good reason to boil it from a food science point of view. All the explanations I can think of make it seem unnecessary.