Managing Mount Vesuvius

I tried a chocolate cake recipe this afternoon. Only one word for it. Awful.

Here's the thing about this particular recipe - the butter had been replaced with natural unflavoured yoghurt. To some degree that makes it a little healthier for you and it often works really well. I've got a great recipe that I'll share soon that has yoghurt as it's base, but this one just didn't work.

It was a rather wet mix and as it cooked it also developed a nasty peak and crack. Now there's some things you can do about that, but sometimes it's really just the cake batter itself. This one was just not the right consistency and although it tasted OK, it was still way to much like a tiny Mount Vesuvius to be useful.

So let's take a look at that. What can you do about the shape of your cake, batter issues aside?

Cakes are like fashion, they follow trends and the aesthetics develop and change. You've probably noticed that flat cakes are all the rage the last few years. You know the ones. They rise beautifully but sit perfectly flat across the top. You could get council approval and build something on it it's so even. And that often happens if Instagram pictures are anything to go by - great monstrosities of chocolate, meringue, biscuits, wafers and syrupy drizzle sometimes accompanied by half the garden.

It's also OK to have a gentle sort of dome on the top, and I really do mean gentle. You don't want it looking like the Roman skyline, Hello Du'omo! But a gentle arc is perfectly divine as long as the surface itself remains smooth.

What can you do to help achieve this? Well it depends on the cake mixture really.

Some people swear by adding a tablespoon of boiling water to the finished batter and stirring it through just before you put the batter into a tin.

You could also drop the tin lightly onto the bench once it's been filled, just enough to knock out a few of the

air bubbles that might be in the mix - but never do that to a sponge. If you've made a round cake you can also give it a little spin on the counter top, that way the batter just spins a little to the outside like in a centrifuge, leaving it slightly lower in the centre before it begins to bake and then rising evenly.

A peaked cake can also mean that your oven is too hot, forcing the outside to cook too fast and then rise to quickly, splitting apart the crust. It might also mean that your cake is sitting too high in the oven as it bakes, so perhaps move it down a little. Look for that oven sweet spot.

Give it a try - different techniques work for different cakes and different cooks. See what you can do.