1,520 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

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 20256,4533

The grease spray

As soon as you have something in a recipe that sticks to the mold, the question always arises as to how difficult it is to remove from the mold. There's nothing more frustrating than breaking your cake when unmolding it, because part of it has stuck in the mold. The classic way to avoid this is...
August 26^th 20255,8745

Cake moulds

When we make a cake, or a cake of the same rectangular shape, we usually take out our usual mould and tell ourselves that the recipe is anyway "for a cake", but is it really that simple?
August 25^th 20256,1115

Thinning out herbs

If you need to add a long-stemmed herb (tarragon, mint, verbena, thyme, etc.) to a recipe, you'll probably only need the leaves and not the stem, so you'll need to remove the leaves. Leaf removal means keeping only the beautiful leaves, and eliminating the ugly stems and leaves, but how do you do...
August 8^th 20254,2955

Add a bay leaf

Bay leaf: small in size, but big in flavor. You'll find it in hundreds of recipes, and it's often added to cooking meat, in a sauce or broth, usually accompanied by other herbs or products. It's a staple of Provençal, Mediterranean and Oriental cuisine, but not the only one. Usually, in a...
July 31^th 20254,3245

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

The importance of sieving

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 2021145 K4.5

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 201934 K4.2

The 3 secrets of Parisian flan

A flan Parisien, or boulanger, is a simple yet delicious cake. A cream, a mixture of milk, eggs and sugar, is poured into a raw pastry base and baked in the oven until the pastry and cream are cooked. This is the simplest version of the recipe, probably the original one, but nowadays the cream...
July 21^th 202315 K4.7

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 201881 K 24.3