Leaving Out the Baking Powder

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Recently I tried a new recipe for a loaf cake! Orange zest, fruits, brown sugar, and chocolate — yum.

…Except I realized about 30 minutes into baking it that the recipe used self-rising flour and I’d used all-purpose.

So there’s no leavening agent. AKA, nothing to make it rise, at all.

Whoops.

When I went online to see how badly I’d goofed, most of the websites talked about what you could use to substitute baking powder, not what happens when you don’t use any leavening agent at all.

(I did find a couple cool pages — one where the baker made 12 loaves of banana bread with different baking mistakes, and one with ideas on how to salvage common bad cake outcomes — but neither was specific to my issue.)

So: here’s what happened when I left baking powder out.

Leaving Out the Baking Powder: Breakdown

Image: A photo of a slice of the failed loaf. It’s flat and studded with fruit and chocolate, resembling wet biscotti.

The loaf: a “tea bread” where dried fruits are soaked in hot tea overnight then used to make a loaf cake. I added chocolate in place of some of the fruit. It bakes low and slow — 300F for 1-1.5 hours (!).

The bake: I did it for the full 1.5 hours. Not sure if this is more due to leaving out the baking powder or if it’s just like that. It was still a bit gooey on the top so I actually ended up slicing it and cooking it in slices like biscotti for another 20 minutes. So that’s a total of almost two hours for this thing!

The look: no surprise, but without anything to make it rise, it’s flat. I mean FLAT flat. Other than that, it’s nicely and uniformly golden-brown on all six sides. Interior is darker than a cake made with all-white sugar would be.

The taste: it’s very dense and kind of chewy. The flavor itself is okay but I feel it’s missing depth — my lack of self-rising flour means I forgot to add salt too. In the meantime I’m sprinkling a bit of salt on top of the cake (which, understandably, led to quite the side-eye from my roommate).

Verdict: definitely could be worse! It’s still edible — not as good as it would be otherwise, but certainly not awful. I’d be hesitant to serve it to company but for the house it’s okay.

Lessons Learned

So this was, um, a learning experience. For one thing, I learned to pay a little more attention, especially when reading international recipes. Apparently the UK uses a lot more self-rising flour than we do here in the USA. But hey! It happens to everyone.

My grandma tells the story of the first pie she ever made, where it was so terrible that my grandfather couldn’t hardly bite through the crust. (She may have thrown the pie at him when he told her it was terrible.) But after practice, her pies got better and better, and she’s the one who taught me how to make them and what to do with the leftover crust — turn it into cinnamon rollups.

None of us are born domestic geniuses. Even Martha Stewart burned the turkey for her first Thanksgiving dinner! It takes practice to get where we want to be, and a lot of trial and error sometimes. Hopefully, my trial and error can help you out!

What’s the worst baking mishap you’ve ever had?