1,527 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

The "caves" in the bakery and pastry shop

Maybe you've already done this? You want to make a brioche or a cake with fruit inside, you decide to proceed with your usual recipe, but also to add in the dough pieces of fresh and raw fruit, or whole fruit, for example pieces of apples or pears, good idea.

When you bake it, everything seems to go well, you may notice that it puffs up more than usual, but nothing to worry about, on the contrary it's quite good news.

It's only when you cut it that you discover the problem, the pieces of fruit are not surrounded by dough, they are in a kind of cavity of the dough, much bigger than them, and so it's quite ugly all this empty space around, and moreover not very pleasant to taste.

12 K 4.9/5 (17 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Pastry Baking Cooking Bread Cake Hollow Bubbles Holes Cave

Last modified on: March 27^th 2021

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

The "caves" in the bakery and pastry shop

What happened?

It's very simple, you have intuitively added pieces of fresh and raw fruit which contain a lot of water. During the baking process, this water was transformed into steam by the heat, and this steam, which can't get out, pushed the not yet baked dough, therefore soft, around each piece of fruit, and formed this hollow that the bakers call "cavern". Once the dough is cooked, the cavern remains in place, even when cooling, and therefore gives this unsightly aspect.

It happens as soon as you add something containing water to a dough, and it is much more pronounced when it is a leavened dough (brioche, bread, because of or thanks to the gluten network) or flaky dough, and much less on travel cakes (cake, cookies, ...) easier to steam through.

This also applies to salted food for example for a sausage in brioche you would have the same problem.

saucisse briochée avec cavernes

How to avoid this?

There are basically 2 solutions: Either you remove/reduce the water in the first place, or you do something to allow the cooking steam to escape.

Removing the water, or at least reducing it is quite simple, for fresh fruit for example we cook them slightly before. For example for apples and pears, in a little butter and sugar, you can even caramelize them, which gives a whole new (delicious) taste to your cake.

pré-cuisson de fruits

For a sausage, same treatment, either you cook it in the oven, or you poach it before incorporating it.
This is the secret of very aesthetic brioche sausages.

saucisse en brioche sans caverne

For a galette des rois for example, it is about 2 discs of puff pastry with cream in the middle, we pierce a small hole, the chimney in the center of the galette to allow the steam to escape. Without this chimney you will have in the oven a kind of huge puff pastry bell, and full of emptiness.

création de cheminée dans une galette des rois

It should be noted that for all this, we are more on a question of aesthetics and mouthfeel, the taste is not impacted.

In summary: To avoid cavities in your cakes, reduce the water brought by your inserts, or provide an outlet for the steam generated during baking.

Lasts posts

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 20251,3295

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 20256,8233

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 20256,2625

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 20256,3635

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 20254,5085

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

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 2021282 K 23.8

Making the most of seeds: Dry roasting

In cooking, and particularly in baking, there are a lot of seeds we can use, such as linseed, sesame, poppy, etc. Usually, recipes simply say to add them just as they are to the mixture or dough. To make a seeded loaf, for example, prepare a plain bread dough as usual, then, towards the end of...
January 30^th 201562 K4.0

What is the difference between bakery and patisserie?

This is a question that you may well have asked yourself and which I will attempt to answer. In France the two trades of "boulangerie" (bakery) and "pâtisserie" (patisserie and confectionery) have always been quite distinct, but where exactly do the boundaries lie? .
February 7^th 2017133 K 14.1

Candied fruits: don't get ripped off

Do you like candied fruit? You might like to nibble a handful or add it to a recipe, like a classic fruit cake or delicious Italian specialities like panettone or sicilian epiphany pie.
June 21^th 201766 K 24.2

Foie gras service

For the upcoming christmas meals you too may be sacrificing to the tradition of foie gras? If so, I suggest you take a look at everything that revolves around serving foie gras: how to serve it, and what to eat and drink with it.
December 23^th 201715 K4.9