Why is every time is i bake cake and the cake always stink after cooling down

Question

here the recipe that i use

Butter Cake (Recipe 1)

Ingredients

250g butter

210g castor sugar

4 eggs

1 tsp vanilla essence

200g self-raising flour, sifted with 1/2 tsp salt

4 tbsp fresh UHT milk

Method

Grease and line a 20cm cake tin with greased greaseproof paper. Preheat oven to 170°C.

Cream butter and sugar until light and creamy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition until mixture is light and fluffy. Add essence.

Fold in sifted flour gradually to mix. Finally stir in milk. Mix until well combined.

Turn out mixture into prepared tin. Level out mixture at the sides but allow a shallow well in the centre. This is to enable the cake to level up evenly during baking.

Bake in preheated oven for 55–60 minutes or until cooked through when tested with a skewer.

Answer 1

I am going to wing this because I am a from the US but just off the bat ditch the greased paper. This is keeping too much moisture in the cake and causing it to fall (sink, not stink). Butter your pan first, dust with flour.

BUT the main thing is don't use self rising flour. Get a better recipe that calls for regular flour, baking powder and or baking soda. You can maintain the balance of your ingredients that way. Sometimes with self rising flour, the 'rise' ingredients sink to the bottom.

The weird directions about not having a shallow area in the center makes me wonder. Most cake batter is very fluid and does not take much more than a tapping the filled pan on a hard surface to level it.

Overall, I think this recipe sux.

Answer 2

Could be that you are under cooking the cake, what does the center look like when you cut into it?  If it's gooey, then it's under cooked.

Also, why are you putting the cake batter on the sides of the cake pan?  That isn't the best way to do it.  Usually you try not to get the batter on the sides of a cake pan.

What do you use to grease the pan?  Try using shortening and then dusting with flour.

Answer 3

It's the paper. Try greasing and flouring the pan instead of the paper. The chemically treated paper is leeching into your batter.

Answer 4

May be bad eggs !!

Answer 5

I hope you mean 'sink', not 'stink' - as I can't imagine why your cake would smell after you cool it down, given your posted recipe.

Cake recipes are really finicky. There are a few tricks I can pass along that you can try and when you get the results you want, make note of these changes on your recipe so you know for next time.

1) Go to your kitchen supply store and buy a simple oven thermometer. Turn your oven on to 170C and put the thermometer in. Test the temperature in a few different places, as ovens are never uniform heat all over. What often happens is you have to calibrate your oven (adjust the temperature up or down to suit the desired temperature. Every oven is different, and can be off by a couple of degrees to 20 or 30 even- big difference). So next time when your recipe calls for 170C you will know that you need to turn up or down your oven accordingly.

2) Make sure butter is room temperature/softened and beat it creamy first before you add the sugar. There is no such thing as overmixing this, but undermixing will adversely affect the texture of your cake

3) Eggs need to be at room temperature also. You can put the raw eggs in a bowl of hot/warm water for a few minutes if you did not take them out of the fridge earlier.

4) Test your self raising flour- I never use self raising flour actually, as its quality degrades in storage and I can't be guaranteed the right amount of leavener in each 200 g or however much I weigh out. (Alternately, when you weigh out your cake flour or all purpose flour, and then measure out your baking soda and/or baking powder and add it, you know exactly what you are getting. It is also easier to test baking soda and baking powder individually-not mixed with flour- to make sure it's not too old and no longer effective. If you have too little in that particular batch of self-raising flour, the cake will not rise properly. If you have too much, it will rise and then fall.

5) Have your cake pans ready and put the batter in the pans immediately after baking and put in the oven- if you let it sit a while before baking, the leaveners are already reacting with the moisture and the cake again, will not rise properly

6) Ignore the leaving a well in the middle. When spreading cake into the pan, use a spatula or knife and generally make the surface even all over, but carefully and gently- do not bang the pan or shake it, as you will lose any air that was trapped in the mixing process and make a dense cake and also affect the rising process.

If the cake rises a bit more in the middle, it is not a big deal. You can either cut it with a long serrated knife while it's still in the pan (if the sides are even but the middle is higher, or remove it from the pan, after cooling, and trim it after.  I have never ever heard of leaving a 'well' in the center of a cake batter before baking and I've looked at thousands of cake recipes.

Try out these tips for cake baking success.

If in fact you did mean 'stink'  - the only sources for smelling up your cake would be a) the freshness of the eggs/butter/milk or b) what you used to grease your parchment paper with. Like this may sound obvious to you but don't use olive oil, or any oil. Crisco or other shortening and light dusting of flour works fine. Alternately what kind of pan are you using? Is it cracked aluminum or non-stick? Did you cool your cake in the fridge where you have onions or garlic or other strong odours? Just brainstorming, lol.

Good luck!