Why Your Cakes Crack After Baking Them (And How To Fix It)

So, you're baking a classic cake and you followed the recipe to the letter (at least, you think you have) — and yet when you pull it out of the oven, there's an unsightly crack or three right on the top of the cake. Sure, you can "glue" it back together with frosting, but it's better to avoid it happening in the first place.

To do that, you'll have to figure out why it cracked — and the bad news is that there can be multiple reasons. Perhaps the most-cited reason is that your oven was too hot. Naturally, you'll want to double-check that you followed the recipe. Remember, baking is a science, not an art, so you should follow recipes closely. But it's also possible that your oven is calibrated wrongly and heating up to higher than the temperature on the dial or display. To repair this is quite complicated, but you can also just use a workaround — put a simple oven thermometer in there, and figure out whether the temperature is off. If you set the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and the thermometer is showing 370, then you'll probably want to set the oven 20 degrees lower.

It's also possible that the recipe is wrong. This is trickier to fix — the ideal solution is to go with a tried-and-tested recipe that's certain (or close enough) to be correct, but if you're really set on using a specific recipe, you could use a trial-and-error approach to get the temperature right.

Although an overly hot oven is a likely culprit for those cracks, there are other possibilities. One is that you've put the cake too high in your oven. Higher oven shelves are hotter, particularly in gas ovens, and there's a greater risk of burning things on it — the middle rack is often considered the best spot.

Another reason could be the size of your cake pan: If it's too small, the cake is forced to expand upwards as it rises, causing cracks. Don't just go for the biggest pan — follow your recipe's instructions for the right size (although if you already did that, remember that it's always possible that a recipe gets it wrong). If you really can't get the right sized pan, one workaround is to put a bowl of water in the oven as the cake bakes: The steam from this keeps things moist and makes the batter less likely to crack.

One final possibility is that you've used too much leavener (like baking powder). This causes a similar problem to the too-small pan, where the cake will expand upwards and crack; it could also overflow. A batter that's too thick (for example, from too much flour or not enough liquid) could also crack in a similar way. You could always try fixing this with a trial-and-error process, but if you followed your recipe correctly, it might be wiser to just find a recipe that gets the ratios correct rather than guessing.