Michaelkingsbaker — A home-baking procedure | michaelkingsbaker.com
A dense or sunken cake almost always traces to oven heat, leavening ratio or a knife used too soon.
The most common cause of a dense, tunneled cake is an oven set above 180 °C. The outer batter sets before the centre has risen, so the crumb compacts and pushes tunnels through itself. Keep cakes at 160–180 °C and the structure has time to form.
The second cause is short leavening. One teaspoon of double-acting baking powder is 4 g and leavens about 125 g — one cup — of flour. Double-acting powder works twice, once in the batter and again on top during baking, which single-acting powder does not; the two are not interchangeable spoon for spoon.
The third cause is the knife. A cake needs 10–15 minutes of rest in the tin, then 30–60 minutes on a rack. Cut warm, the still-soft crumb compresses and never recovers — the slice looks dense and feels damp even when the bake was perfect, and it dries out faster afterwards.
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If the recipe rises on whipped whites, temperature decides the foam: soft peaks at about 71–74 °C and hard peaks at about 82 °C. In a 20 °C kitchen a weak-looking bowl is usually under-whipped rather than ruined, so keep whipping before adjusting anything else.
What reads as dryness the next day is often one of these three in disguise: a crumb compressed by early cutting, or a crumb set too fast by an oven above 180 °C. Fix the number and the texture follows.
For oven settings across every bake, the oven temperature and internal doneness page has the full table; the home page's six-step procedure shows how the cake checklist sits alongside the bread routine.
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