Hi Amy! That’s so interesting! It’s hard to know what to recommend without seeing the recipe and knowing what size pans you’re using. If you want to experiment with the temp I would recommend turning the oven down (for example, if the recipe says 350F I would try 325F) and baking for 10-15 minutes longer than the recipe states. Hope that helps!

Hi Pete! The beating helps develop the gluten, not add gluten. I went ahead and rephrased that in the blog post. Mixing flours with liquids activates the gluten proteins that give baked goods their structure, and overmixing can basically add too much structure to a cake, resulting in a more dense crumb.

Hi Gina! Is it one of my lemon cake recipes? What exactly is happening – are they underbaked? overbaked? Sinking? For larger cake pans you may need to bake the cakes 25 degrees lower for longer (low and slow) but until I know what recipe you’re using I can’t be sure how you should move forward.

Hi Fran! Do the cakes look ok when you take them out of the oven and then shrink when you’re allowing them to cool in the pan? Or do they look that way right when they come out of the oven? If you let a cake cool in the pan too long, the sides will pull away from the cake pan and shrink toward the center, so I recommend only allowing the cakes to cool in the pan for about 5 minutes before turning it out and letting it cool on a cooling rack or baking sheet. I don’t recommend increasing the amount of baking soda unless you’re increasing all of the other ingredients by the same rate (ie scaling up the recipe).

Hi Georgia! A few questions: 1) What size are your glass baking pans? 2) What brand of box mix are you using? 3) are you making any substitutions or adding anything other than what the box mix calls for?