My Chocolate Cake Overfloweth

[BakerAunt]

I'm posting in the dessert baking topic because I am hoping people can help me troubleshoot what went wrong. The smell of burning chocolate is still in the air.

On Monday, I decided to bake a Chocolate Heart cake recipe that I first baked several years ago. The recipe is from Kaiser Backform for their heart pan. I had it in the oven, and I was washing up when I smelled that horrible odor of burning chocolate. The pan had overflowed, which it did not do last time. I turned the vent fan on high to prevent the smoke detector from going off. At this point, I had no choice but to let it finish baking I took it out after 30 minutes. Cooled it in the pan for 6 minutes, then pried the burnt over edge pieces off to loosen it before inverting it onto a rack. It came out beautifully, which is good, because otherwise I would have cried. (I used The Grease on the pan.) I cut away the excess on the edges and tasted it; the flavor is good. I then set about cleaning my oven.

I have made this recipe before, as written, with no problem. This time I replaced ¼ cup of AP flour with barley flour and used King Arthur AP for the rest. I added 2 tsp. BRM milk powder. I used olive oil rather than canola oil. I cut the salt in half. I also baked it on the second rack up this time, whereas I had used the third rack up last time--back when I was still figuring out the oven.

Here are the ingredients from the original recipe:

1 cup sugar
3/4 cup flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa (natural)
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt

1 egg
1/2 cup coffee0flavored liqueur (used Kahlua)
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup oil (used olive oil)
1 tsp. vanilla

I changed the mixing instructions to do what I always do with oil cakes: I combined the sugar with the oil and buttermilk, then the egg, the Kahlua, and the vanilla. I mixed by hand this time instead of with a mixer for two minutes.

Does anyone have any idea why the cake overflowed its pan this time?

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[Joan Simpson]

No idea BakeAunt sorry this happened.

[Mike Nolan]

Maybe you mis-measured something? How full was the pan? Did the batter seem different?

[BakerAunt]

I know that I measured correctly, and I looked back at the original recipe to confirm the amounts. The cake was below the edge of the pan, fairly full, but usually an oil cake does not rise as much, so I was not worried. I only baked this recipe once before, and that was a few years ago, so I do not know if the batter seemed different.

I think that the next time I make it, I will take out 1/3 cup of batter and bake it in a separate small pan.

[BakerAunt]

Cass just called me. He says hello to all of you at Nebraska Kitchen!

He saw this post and gave me his observations. I hope that I do justice to his explanation here.

1. The sugar in the recipe outweighs the flour by quite a lot. That means the sugar did not have the chance to combine with the other ingredients before liquifying. He suggests that I use equal weights, which means reversing the amounts of flour and sugar the recipe specifies. I will weigh the ingredients next time, and adjust so that the weights are equal, either by increasing flour or reducing sugar, or perhaps doing both.

2. He noted the large amount of baking soda in the recipe. He thought that the person who put the recipe together was probably trying to make up for the sugar-flour imbalance by employing that much baking soda. Cass suggests halving the amount.

3. He warned me about the lack of gluten in barley flour, which could contribute. I still think that I can get away with that partial substitution, as long as I make the first two adjustments and use King Arthur AP for the rest.

I'll be giving the recipe another try, using the first two adjustments, but I won't be doing it right away. I will post again on this thread when I do.

I have had some issues with the Kaiser Backform recipes in the past. I remember Cass adjusting a pumpkin cake recipe for me. I think part of the problem stems from converting a German recipe that was likely in grams to a recipe for Americans that is done by volume. I also think that there may be some differences in ingredients between European and American products that are not taken into account.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm always happy to hear from Cass, directly or indirectly, and I can't fault Cass's chemical thoughts and recommendations, but they don't really explain why didn't overflow last time but did this time, unless I'm missing the significance of the changes you made since then.

[BakerAunt]

Well, last time, I baked the cake on the third rack up, so maybe that slowed down the sugar liquification until it combined?

Another factor could be that I mixed by hand instead of using a hand mixer to beat for the specified two minutes. Maybe that combined the ingredients more thoroughly?

[Mike Nolan]

If anything, the third rack should be hotter than the middle one, because heat rises. I know when I made my last batch of peanut butter cookies, I had 3 that didn't fit on the big sheet pan, so I baked them on the top shelf and they were done 3-4 minutes earlier.

2 minutes with a hand mixer is probably 3-4 minutes by hand. Maybe more mixing causes more of the baking soda to produce gas before it goes in the oven, reducing the amount of rise during baking?

I've not made a lot of oil cakes, though Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake, which uses butter, probably qualifies. I generally don't fill a baking pan more than 2/3 full of cake batter. (Or I put a jelly roll pan underneath it to catch spills, it's far easier to clean a pan than to clean the bottom of the oven.)

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