How did my cake drown in a bain-marie

December 22, 2023 7:59 AM

I have successfully made David Lebovitz's flourless chocolate cake recipe literally dozens of times and yesterday it came out drenched in an inch of water and revoltingly, grainily uncooked -- even after double time in the oven. This cake is sometimes jokingly called "Idiot cake" because any idiot can do it. Not yesterday.

I apologize for the lack of recipe, but cannot either link or cut and paste with the device i'm on. But this cake is just melted dark chocolate, butter, eggs and sugar. You put it into a springform pan and place that in a bain marie or water bath, a roasting pan with water. You cover the top of the springform pan with foil, and wrap the bottom and sides as well so it won't get leaked into.
These are things that are possibly relevant:
1. I used extra tin foil around the base and top of the springform pan -- significantly more foil than usual. I wondered if this somehow prevented the cake from getting hot enough.
2. My normal roasting pan was not available so I used a disposable aluminum one that i bought just for this. It had a leak, so I refilled it a couple of times. That means I opened the oven about 3 times in the first 75 minutes and then again every 20 to 30 minutes to check for done-ness for the next 75 minutes til I gave up.
3. The roasting pan was leaking onto a cookie sheet I put on the rack below it. The oven seemed pretty steamy.
4. The roasting pan was MUCH bigger and deeper than the one I'm used to. The springform pan was all the way inside it, the roasting pan came up higher than the springform pan.
5. Again there is no way that water from the bain-marie got into the springform pan because I used an absolute boatload of tin foil wrapping the springform pan.
I am attempting this cake again today and really, really do not want to waste another bunch of ingredients and hours of my life.
Any ideas appreciated!

posted by ojocaliente to Food & Drink (7 answers total)

I think it's clear that your wrapping, even having been doubled, failed, and water from the bain-marie leaked into the springform pan. This happened to me frequently enough when attempting to make cheesecakes in similarly prepared springform pans that I've completely abandoned using a bain-marie.

In my attempts to diagnose the problem, I noticed that the aluminum foil almost always develops pinholes when crumpled, and, somewhat unexpectedly, "heavy duty" alumunum foil may actually be more likely to leak for this reason. Double layers of alumninum foil sometimes helped prevent it but more often than not they still leaked bain-marie water into the cake.
posted by pullayup at 8:15 AM on December 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

I guess I should suggest alternatives. I switched to using cake strips. They are not truly a substitute for a bain-marie but do seem to moderate the temperature differential between the edge of the pan and the center and helped cut down on cheesecake cracking. Lacking a commercial product, you can fake up your own with folded wet kitchen towels and aluminum foil wrapped around the pan.
posted by pullayup at 8:21 AM on December 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's not clear to me whether you ended up with more soupy liquid + uncooked cake in the pan than the total amount of batter you started with, but if you don't have a lot of extra liquid volume I wonder if adding extra water to the bath a few times caused some cooling and condensation and made the steam rain down inside the springform pan?

This wouldn't be likely if you were adding hot/boiling water, but maaaybe possible with cool water.
posted by fountainofdoubt at 9:01 AM on December 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Could steam have been condensing on the top of the oven and dripping onto your cake? Seems like water hitting the bottom of the hot oven might contribute to that.
posted by amanda at 11:03 AM on December 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Serious Eats' interpretation uses a cake pan and parchment paper - no springform pan, no leaks. Maybe this is an option for you?
posted by hydra77 at 11:05 AM on December 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

It just sounds like the whole oven contained a lot more water vapor than was normal, due to the leaking pan.
posted by oneirodynia at 2:50 PM on December 22, 2023

Best answer: I get water leaking in basically every time I use a springform pan in a water bath, foil or no, to the degree that I use a normal cake pan (or a silicone one if I want easy removal) for baking my own annual chocolate idiot cake. I'd definitely assume that's what happened here. Sometimes you get sloshing rather than leaks, or condensation up also if you have foil covering / over the cake.
posted by Lady Li at 8:50 AM on December 24, 2023