1,544 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 20251,4545

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 20251,2775

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 20251,172

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 20253,3095

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 20257,9203

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

The 3 kinds of meringue

Meringue – what could be simpler? Just beaten egg whites with sugar added. This makes a fairly stiff mixture which can then be cooked in a cool oven to create those lovely, light confections. But in the world of professional patisserie, meringue comes in three different kinds. Even if the...
June 14^th 201365 K4.5

Kitchen ovens

You certainly have one in your kitchen, an oven, the essential tool for all kinds of cooking, whether in the kitchen of course, but also in pastry, bakery, pizza, and many others. Here is some information on its structure and operation.
May 16^th 202034 K4.4

Butter doesn't make you fat, unless you eat too much of it.

Whenever I'm discussing cooking and recipes, there is one idea which comes up frequently, like this: "Oh no! But that's got butter in it" (I should add, for the sake of accuracy, that this is something I hear more frequently from women, who are almost all concerned with keeping their figure). ...
March 26^th 201245 K4.5

How to zest a fruit?

You will have no doubt noticed that many recipes call for the zest of citrus fruit. The zest is that outer layer of the skin which adds so much flavour to a dish. There are many different ways to peel off the zest and various tools are available. Here is a summary of the “dos and don'ts” of...
November 5^th 201347 K3.8

Steam for baking bread

What does steam have to do with bread-making? This is not only a bakers' secret, it is something you might not think of at all: if you make bread and bake it like a cake, you will end up with bread, but pale and with a thick, hard crust – a long way from the golden-brown crusty loaf you had in...
June 16^th 2021147 K4.5