Sinking cakes?

Baking is one big chemical reaction. Baking a cake is considered an endothermic reaction when the gooey batter turns into a fluffy dessert. This is why baking is all about trial and error. Adding to much of one ingredient may cause for the whole dessert and texture of the treat to be off.

An ingredient that you may want to avoid is fresh fruit. The fresh fruit releases a lot of extra moisture into the cake which will cause the center of the cupcake to collapse in. The trial and error needs to be taken to find the best way to add the fruit without introducing so much moisture. 

I learned of this when I tried to make a banana split cupcake recipe. The base was a recipe for regular chocolate cupcakes and I decided to add fresh strawberries into the batter before I baked it. I put them in the oven for the time that was called based on the recipe that I chose, but when I took them out they looked like the image above. When we ate the cupcakes later, they were so dense. The recipe that I chose was not made for all of the moisture that came from the strawberries that I added in. So I learned that I needed to make sure that I can add extra ingredients before I just add them in and bake it.

Katie 🍓