Hi guys, I wonder if someone can please help me figure out what I:m doing wrong with my baking.  I  know the pic below purely looks like this cake is undercooked, but what I don't understand is that I checked this cake several times towards the end of the baking time & although its only a 6" vanilla sour cream cake it took well over an hour to cook & when I first checked, the top had cracked & the middle was still uncooked!   I do use homemade baking strips when cooking a bigger cake, mainly if they are mud cakes, but for a cake this size I really didn;t think it was necessary..maybe thats incorrect?  I checked the cake several times further before my flat bladed knife came out completely clean (also checked in several different area of the cake not just one) After cutting off the top cracked part (which did look slightly undercooked/doughey) as  you can see from the attached picture, the middle is definitely still undercooked/doughey.  So annoying, what am I doing wrong? Do any of  you experienced bakers out there think this could actually be more to do with the mixing of the batter rather than the cooking method?  This has happened to me a couple of times now & I' really beginning to feel like giving up (although have baked perfectly good cakes in the past!) So really not sure whats going on:((  I do use an oven thermometer by the way in case oven not very accurate & cooked this cake at 150d.  Any advice would be more than welcome.  Thanks guys.

Hi g

Maybe some of our Aussie friends can step in here and give you some advice about mud cakes.  Was this particular recipe a mud cake?  Can you post the recipe you used?  I have never baked a mud cake, but from my understanding it does take quite a long time for those to bake.

Hi AnnieCahill,

I'm from you're end of the world - just up the road on the Central Coast.

If the top of the cake is cracked but the middle is raw then you most likely have the oven temp to high.  I notice also that the cake is quit brown on the outside and cracked at the sides which again indicates too high a temp when the middle is still under-cooked.   Alternatively, you may need to incorporate more air into your mix by increasing the beating time at the beginning (the sugar/butter/egg stages).  If you're beating your mix well and you think the temp is really not the problem - and you've had success with other cake recipes then I would scrap this recipe and find another version - sometimes recipes are just poorly edited and a small error can make something baked unworkable.

Your picture still makes me hungry though :)