I’m making a spiced cranberry bundt cake and am using a bundt pan with a design that has some nooks/crannies. I smacked the pan against the countertop 7 or 8 times to settle the batter into those nooks/crannies (not too hard, but firmly) and wondered after the fact if I could have screwed up anything by doing this. (baking=chemistry ignorance showing here, I’m sure!) I had to beat the batter for a bit, as the recipe says, and I know that little air bubbles get in there, and I just wonder if smacking the bottom of the pan might have, I don’t know—messed up the “chemistry” somehow?
I suppose doing this could have “sunk” the cranberries a little, but who knows, maybe them being closer to the top on the finished cake might look cool or something.
Looks like a thickish batter in your recipe (btw, yum) so I don’t think you’ll have any detrimental side effects. That many whacks isn’t enough vibrations to deflate your batter.
I think you did the right thing; I’m going to be making gingerbread in a bundt pan for Thanksgiving and I usually use a small ladle (gravy ladle) to fill in the little nooks and crannies first; then I let that settle for a few minutes before putting in the rest of the batter and then smack the pan a few times as you did. I’m a little overly detailed about it; yours will turn out fine.
Will do. It’s being taken to a Thanksgiving dinner I’m going to today. So far it looks grrrreat! Will do the glaze a few hours before leaving and cooked a few fresh cranberries (the way you do when you make cranberry sauce) and will plop a few of those in the nooks/crannies for decoration once I get to the party.
A note: if any of you are intrigued by this recipe and want to make it yourself, DO NOT follow the time it tells you to bake this thing. Luckily I read the reviews, and overwhelmingly the positives were from the people that had the good sense to take it out at 45-50 minutes, and the negatives were from those who cooked it for the full 1 hour 15 minutes and got a dry, crumbly fail!
A friend brought this cake over this past weekend, and she mentioned that you want to pull it from the oven before the cake tester comes out totally clean. She waited until her toothpick came out crumb-free, and while the cake is not particularly dry, it’s much crumblier than you might like. It’s pretty delicious, though.
The cake turned out perfect—it had a bit of crumb that I would guess came from the almond flour in it, but it was not dry at all, which I would guess came from the greek yogurt. A good combination. A great cake—got devoured at the party!
So, smacking the bottom was at best a good idea as far as preventing bubbles, and at worst a non-issue for the “integrity” of the cake! Sigh of relief!
