1,539 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies necessary for its operation. By continuing to browse, you accept their use.
To find out more...

The cake and the raisins

When you bake a cake, like a cake or pound cake, you may have already encountered this thorny problem: How to make sure that the raisins, or the candied fruits, or any other small filling, do not fall to the bottom of the pan during the baking process?

15 K 4.7/5 (22 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Cake Cake Pastry Raisins Dough Filling

Last modified on: May 31^th 2019

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

The cake and the raisins

It's not that simple to have this even distribution, basically you want to have this:

raisins régulièrement répartis

Rather than this:

raisins irrrégulièrement répartis

For this, or rather to avoid the second option, bakers all learn in their training the following method (let's say you want to make a cake with diced candied orange):

You put the diced candied oranges (or raisins, etc.) in a bowl, and sprinkle them with a little flour taken from the flour provided for the cake batter. Note that no extra flour is added.

dés d'oranges confites et farine mélangée

Mix everything carefully, with a fork, to coat all the orange cubes with flour.
This is quite easy with candied fruit because it is sticky, if you use raisins that are a little too dry, to which the flour does not stick, moisten them very slightly (1 tablespoon of water) before pouring in the flour.

Then make your cake batter as normal, add the excess flour from the bowl, and just before putting into the tin, add the floured candied fruit, mix quickly, put into the tin and bake.

Well, I have to be honest with you, it's not a 100% sure method, the great Gaston Lenôtre himself, when he explains this method in his books, adds at the end "in theory...".

So I propose you another method that I like:

You make your dough normally, once finished, you do not put it in the mold, but in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour
At the end of this time, the dough will have firmed up because of the butter it contains => add the raisins or candied fruits at this time, and stir well (be careful, it is much harder than a dough coming out of the mixer)
Put it in a mould and put it in the oven immediately

You can try these 2 methods, and choose the one that seems to you the most effective, or, why not, combine the two.

To sum up: To prevent the filling of a cake from falling to the bottom of the pan when baking, you have to either coat the filling with a little flour, or incorporate the filling into a very cold dough, or both.

Lasts posts

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20259185

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20251,0685

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 2025963

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20252,6475

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20257,4723

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

The window-pane test in bread-making

The home bread-makers often ask themselves “Have I kneaded my dough long enough?” . A good question, as dough that is insufficiently kneaded will not rise properly or will fall flat when the top is slashed, which is very frustrating. To know when the dough is ready, one can rely on the length...
June 16^th 202196 K 23.9

A few tips for effective kneading at home

When you have to knead dough for bread or some other recipe, you may well use a food processor or the type of machine known as a stand mixer. The best-known brands are Kenwood and KitchenAid. They are useful tools, but here are a few tips to help you get the best out of them.
June 23^th 2021284 K 23.8

Egg yolks and caster sugar

We often come across recipes where we need to mix egg yolks with caster sugar. This would appear to be a very ordinary and simple thing to do but, be warned, these two ingredients can behave oddly together.
February 15^th 201882 K 24.3

85 grams of eggs?

Some time ago, I already spoke to you about the difference between baking and pastry-making, I emphasized, among other things, the precision of pastry-making which requires grams, cm, degrees and minutes. That's why, on the one hand, you have baking and cooking, where a certain tolerance is...
November 26^th 201856 K4.6

For well opened (puffed) cakes

It's always nice to have a well puffed up cake after baking, not only will it taste good but it looks great too. Let's see how to get this beautiful shape almost every time.
January 23^th 201935 K4.2