I’m a reasonably good baker. I’ve had some disappointing results in my time, but never an epic fail like this.
I used this recipe, and the results were the most terrifying thing ever to happen in my kitchen.
After baking at the recommended temperature for the recommended 40 minutes, I found that the whole thing had exploded, covering my oven in (admittedly delicious-smelling) goo. Everything in the pan was still liquid. I took the pan out, and it hardened on top of the stove into a horrible, inexplicably dark brown brick of bubbly nasty ick that looks like burn scars.
What the hell?
ETA Gah, that title should be **WTF **happened to my coffee cake. Typos suck.
Okay, this is a WAG, and I’m sure someone much savvy will be along, but:
isn’t buttermilk slightly acidic? What happens when you mix it with the soda? I’ve seen volcanoes as school projects where they mix vinegar and baking soda to make the lava. Could that be what happened?
Well, the acidity in the buttermilk combined with the soda is what is going to create the chemical leavening process, else you’re baking a hockey puck. 1 cup of buttermilk with one teaspoon baking soda won’t create a volcano.
The coffee cake recipe I use calls for the buttermilk and soda to be combined before it’s mixed with the dry ingredients. The buttermilk kind of foams up a little after you mix it with the soda, but it doesn’t make an impressive buttermilk volcano. It makes the best coffee cake I’ve ever had.
So do I, and not only do I not have coffee cake, I’m out of brown sugar and I don’t want to go out because it’s coooooooooooooold!
ivylass, I had the same thought, but I’ve combined buttermilk and baking soda a bunch of times without this happening!
criminey, I did reserve the cup of topping. The cake bubbled up around it and enveloped it! I can see the layer of topping in the middle through the glass pan. Or at least I could before I threw the pan out. No way am I even trying to clean that up.
I’ll just start off with saying, I hateCooks.com. Recipes there are often vague and poorly written; they’re all reader-submitted with no editing or testing, and I could see where people could get easily confused.
Well, let’s try some troubleshooting here:
Did you bake this in a 9 x 13 pan? If it ‘exploded’ (which I’m thinking you mean it expanded fast and spilled over–not a BOOM) it may have had nowhere to go if your pan was too small.
How’s your oven temperature? Is it running too hot?
I’ll tell you, though, this coffee cake recipe just sounds… odd. Too much sugar, not enough flour for the topping (which probably explains the brick-like ick).
If you want a great gingerbread recipe, go here. (Skip the chocolate glaze, but that cake is AWESOME.)
Yep, too much sugar in that topping–it caramelized too quickly, with it not having enough flour to be that lovely crumbly topping that we love in coffee cake.
I don’t think it was you. It sounds like a crap recipe.
