I have a vegan friend that needs cheering up. I like to bake, so I decided to cook her a vegan cake from a recipe I found online (no butter, no eggs). It was pretty good, but too crumbly and fragile (I would have had to ship it to her) because it lacked eggs, which normally act as a binder. To compensate, I remade the cake with bread flour instead of all purpose flour, figuring the additional gluten would toughen up the cake and make it less crumbly. It worked. However, the cake fell in the middle :smack: (too much to cover with frosting). What’s the deal? 
The thing is, the cake rises and falls (instead of failing to rise enough), which would normally indicate too much leavening (in this case, baking soda, cocoa powder, and vinegar). Decreasing the baking soda and vinegar helped, but not enough. The bread flour used is about 10 years old. Could this be a factor? Does flour go stale? The cake tasted great 
, but I wanna get this right before I try again.
Yes, age likely is a factor. The Feds like flour with a minimum shelf life of 1 year (bottom of page), but even without insects, a decade is really pushing it!
The common advice for refined flours is usually along these lines:
I think that’s conservative, and will keep bread flour for a year, but ten years? :eek:
Bread flour only costs $2.50 for 5 pounds.