Kings Bakehouse
Dense, dry or sunken cakes are almost always a temperature, leavening or resting failure — and each has a number attached.
The dense, tunneled cake: the oven was above 180 °C. At that heat the outside of the batter sets before the cake has risen, trapping the unrisen centre; the crumb bakes dense with tunnels where gas escaped late. Cakes want 160–180 °C — the lower end for thick batters in deep tins.
The cake that never rose: check the leavener dose. One teaspoon of double-acting baking powder is 4 g and leavens about 125 g (1 cup) of flour; a 250 g flour cake needs two level teaspoons, not one heaped guess. Double-acting powder works twice — once in the batter and again during baking — which is why it tolerates a wait before the oven; single-acting powder does not.
The weak sponge that would not hold a peak: egg whites reach soft peaks at about 71–74 °C and hard peaks at about 82 °C. A bowl that looks weak in a 20 °C kitchen is usually under-whipped rather than over-whipped, so keep whisking before blaming the eggs or reaching for more sugar.
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The dry-next-day cake is usually an overbaked one. Because crust colour is a poor judge, pull the cake when the centre is just set and let resting finish the job: 10–15 minutes in the tin so the structure firms, then 30–60 minutes on a rack so steam escapes instead of soaking the crumb.
The sunken middle is the same story from the other side: the centre was still soft when the cake left the oven, and the structure collapsed as it cooled. And the compressed slice — cut while warm — never recovers, because the still-soft crumb stays crushed. Resting is not a courtesy; it is the last stage of the bake.
The same discipline rescues bread: most loaf failures are proofing or doneness numbers, mapped in the routine on the home page (/) and in Dough Temperature, Bulk Proof and Final Rise (/sourdough-and-yeast-dough-temperatures).
Further reading