How can I rescue a soft cake without losing too much flavour?
I've recently baked a sheet cake with fresh apples, vanilla pudding and crumbles.
The moment I took the tray out of my oven I saw that the cake wasn't really baked. The fluids within the pudding and apples seemed to have wandered into the base of my cake which made the whole cake so soft that I could neither cut nor grab it. My solution was to just bake it a really long time with not too much heat. In the end I had my cake but it was nowhere near as fruity and fresh as it was supposed to be. Furthermore, the whole process took way longer than I originally anticipated.
In the future, how can I save a cake if it's too soft due to fluids within ingredients and without loosing too much flavour?
1 answer
Take it as a lesson for next time!
Fundamentally, if your cake isn't done yet, there's not much you can do except bake it for longer - there are things you can do before you cook it, but once it's in a half-baked state, there's not much to be done except finish baking.
For cakes with fruit in them, you could consider adding some of the same fresh fruit as a topping once the cake is done; that won't do much for the cake itself, but it'll add back some of the fresh-fruit flavours to the finished thing.
Make a note on your recipe that this particular cake needs less liquid. Bear in mind that this will hold for a lot of cakes that use fresh fruit: there's a surprising amount of liquid in the fruit itself, so you often need a little less than if you were baking the same cake without fruit.
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