August 14, 2021

Juniper Lime Drizzle Cake (aka Why Did My Cake Fall?)

Warning: while there may be a recipe for a juniper lime drizzle cake included with this post, I can’t recommend that you make it. You see, I created this loaf cake with dried juniper berries for the reddit 52 week baking challenge (Week 31: unusual ingredients). But it has provided me more with lessons about why cakes fall in the oven than with a delicious cake for you to make.

Although I will admit I’ve happily eaten a piece of one of the three cake variations for breakfast for most of the last couple of weeks.

The fourth cake I gave away.

a tablespoon of juniper berries and extra berries on a blue plate

I can’t tell you why I purchased those dried juniper berries. But they were the “unusual ingredient” I immediately reached for.

I had the idea to make a cake with gin and tonic flavors using ground juniper berries and lime.

a plate containing dried juniper berries and a glass bowl of ground juniper

I mistakenly thought it would be simple. I would take my recipe for blackberry lemon bread, leave out the blackberries, substitute lime for lemon, and add some finely ground juniper berries for flavor.

Nope. My cake fell while it was still in the oven.

a fallen loaf cake in the pan with an oven mitt on the kitchen counter

I had been baking in a rush and doing too many things at the same time. So I thought I had made a mistake in measuring or something. I had also made the mistake of opening the door of the oven to take a picture of the batter in the pans before it baked.

I immediately made a second cake, reducing a bit of the liquid. But it fell again in the exact same way.

Probably the most common reason for why cakes fall after baking is because they are underbaked. The moist cake/bread/etc can’t sustain the structure and collapses.

But why cakes fall during baking is less clear. Or at least it was less clear to me So I reached out for help. Below were all of the suggested explanations.

Reasons why a cake might fall during baking

Possible reason #1: Opening the door during baking. The rush of room temperature air into the oven could have contributed to why my first loaf collapsed. But not any others.

Possible reason #2: Inadequate chemical leavening. I initially wondered whether the change from lemon juice to lime juice could have varied the acidity enough to result in less reaction with the chemical leavening agents.

It turns out that limes are actually more acidic than lemons, so there was no reason to suspect less chemical reaction. Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) reacts with acid to release carbon dioxide: NaHCO₃ + H⁺ → Na⁺ + CO₂ + H₂O

Although baking soda is more potent than baking powder, it can also produce a metallic taste, so one recommendation was for me to increase the baking powder in the recipe.

But first I wanted to check to make sure both were active. To do this, you mix baking powder with boiling water – it should froth up immediately. Mixing baking soda with vinegar should do the same.

checking on baking powder activity by mixing it with boiling water

checking on baking soda activity by mixing it with vinegar

Possible reason #3: insufficient mechanical leavening. Someone suggested that perhaps I needed to adequately cream my butter and sugar in the first step, which I already do, or to beating it for longer at the end, which I generally try to avoid so I don’t build up the gluten too much and get holes in my cakes.

Possible reason #4: Change in altitude or barometric pressure.

Possible reason #5: cake pan the wrong size. I thought this was an interesting idea, that maybe I was baking the cake in the wrong pan. So for my third and fourth cakes, I baked in a 9″x5″ (what I had been baking in) and a 8.5″x4.5″ just to see if baking it in a smaller pan would be helpful.

As you can see in the pic below, the smaller pan actually resulted in a larger collapse than the 9″x5″, although the cake in the larger pan still did fall.

two juniper lime cakes baked in different sized pans

FAQs about juniper and this juniper lime drizzle cake

What are juniper berries?

Juniper berries aren’t really berries, but they are the seed cone of juniper trees.

How are juniper berries typically used in cooking?

I’ve used juniper berries in small quantities when cooking meats or duck.

How are juniper berries used to make gin?

Juniper berries are left to soak in the alcohol, infusing their flavor to varying degree depending on the gin.

Did you weigh out your ingredients?

There is so much variation in how people measure that you are much more likely to get a reliable result if you weigh your ingredients. I always weigh out ingredients. I still have a deal that I’ll send a basic kitchen scale to the first ten U.S. readers who sign up for my newsletter and leave a comment to promise they will start weighing out all of their ingredients!

Print Pin