What happened to my cake?

[rockycat]

I made the CI recipe for Yellow Cake with Old Fashioned Chocolate Frosting. The recipe calls for using 2 9-inch pans. I made it in a Bundt pan, skipped the frosting and added fruit to the batter and a swirl of brown sugar, nuts, and coconut. The volume was perfect and the cake tasted very nice but...

The texture was the weirdest thing. The Spouse likened it to a steamed Chinese rice pastry. I thought it resembled a kugel. The outside was beautiful if a little bit dark, the outer layer of the inside had a proper crumb for about an 1/8 of an inch all around and the inside was pudding-like and rubbery. I baked for 65 minutes.

The technique on this cake is a little odd. The recipe has you mixing together mixing together the dry ingredients, then using a stand mixer to "cut in" 2 sticks of butter until you get pea-sized clumps. You then add 1 c. of the mixed together liquid ingredients, beat to combine, then beat until fluffy. You add the remaining ounce or two of liquid in a thin stream, beat to combine, and bake. The batter is very pale and light weight. I stirred in my fruit right at the end and swirled in the nut/sugar mixture in the pan.

Any ideas how I came up with a tasty Superball of a cake and how I could correct it?

P.S. (Five minutes later) I looked over my recipe printout again, compared it to the online version, and saw that my printout called for 1 3/4 c. cake flour, sifted vs. the online recipe's 2 1/4 c. cake flour, sifted. Did 1/2 c, flour make all that difference?

[chef chicklet]

Fruit has a lot of moisture to it, maybe placing the fruit at the bottom, add the batter to the top. Kugel like? I got that same result with pineapple upside down cake with coconut in the batter and the fresh pineapple was just too juicy.

[bw2082]

In addition to not having enough flour, with the inclusion of the brown sugar and fruits, I think you changed the pH of the batter which screwed things up.

[middydd]

Agree that it was a combination of adding extra liquid, with the fruit, and too little flour.

[rockycat]

I'm thinking that has to be the answer - too much liquid, too little flour. I have no idea how that error crept in, but my sheet of paper clearly says 1 3/4 c. flour. Oh well, at least it tastes good.

[mpalmer6c]

It takes quite a bit of experience in baking in baking to just wing it. It's usually better to find a recipe you might like and follow that pretty precisely. Some new recipes have dozens of failures before they're published.

[amyzan]

I think it was a combination of increasing the liquid proportion by adding fruit and decreasing the dry with less flour. How the heck did CI's recipe print out with 1/2 c. less flour? Did you have an old uncorrected version of the recipe?

[fern]

The added fruit may have done it.
Once we added a jar of what is probably just cherry pie filling to a brownie recipe to take a drastic shortcut to black forest flavors. It tasted good enough but the texture was rubbery and strange, not cakey.