How to fix those cracks in your cake

Don't you hate it when you bake a beautiful batter into a scrumptious cake only to find a nasty crack or two across the centre - and what can you do about it?

Prevention is always better than cure , so the first thing you need to do is stop it happening in the first place.

Cracks appear on your lovely cake when the outside of the cake has cooked far more quickly then the inside. Essentially what happens is the outside of the cake cooks fast, causing it to form a fine tasty crust that then tends to go a little brittle. As the inside of the cake cooks, it expands - like most hot things do - but as the outside of the cake has already formed a crust and hardened, the inside has nowhere to go but to bust right through. Crack!

As per my last post, this can be pretty extreme and at times you can end up with a cake that resembles Mount St Helens on it's worst day. Other times though it's just a crack or two that can be managed, if you act fast.

An ounce of Prevention

So, given that this is about the outside of the cake cooking too fast for the inside, the obvious solution is to slow it down.

• It may mean that your oven temperature is a little too high, exposing the cake's surface to too much immediate heat. Outside cooked, inside ready to bust its way out through the top.

• It may also mean that your cake is sitting too high in the oven. Heat rises remember, so it's just too hot up there for his little buns to cooks evenly.

• It could be that your bakeware is thin and isn't conducting the heat evenly enough, letting the outside cook to quickly.

A pound of Cure

If you have a cake that has small cracks in the top there might be a few things you can do to help minimise the damage.

• Hot things expand, while cold things shrink - ask any man his advice on that one! So what you can do once youtake the cake from the oven is cool it, and fast,

• I like to pop the whole thing in the freezer for a few minutes including the tin and the cold air will start to shrink the crust a little. You should also notice the cake pull away from the sides of the tin. That's the shrinkage you're looking for. I know people that do this with some clean, slightly damp freezing cloth - preferring to drape that across the tin and surface of the cake rather than put the whole thing in the freezer for a little bit. That works too.

• Either way, don't let it get stone cold. Room temperature is good, because you still have one thing to do that might help.

• When you get the cake out of the tin, leave it top side down on a clean towel (don't leave it on a wire rack, you don't want those rack marks in your cake!) and leave it to cool completely - upside down. The slight pressure on the cake surface resting on its top should help to close off those cracks.

Take a look at the chocolate cake in the photo - that's one I did on the weekend and although the cracks weren't big to begin with, you can certainly see that they've shrunk. I iced this one later with some chocolate buttercream and you would never know that it was having a bit of a bad day. It was delicious.