The Best Way To Avoid Sinking Fruit In Cake Batter, According To A Professional Baker

Use these professional baking tips to make sure your fruit is evenly suspended in show-stopping cake layers.

We’ve all been there: You hold your breath as you slice into a stately cake that you’ve spent hours preparing in the hope that it looks as good on the inside as it does on the outside. Even the most seasoned bakers run into the post-bake jitters when knife meets cake for the first time.

Cakes baked with fresh fruit tend to be the most finicky. It’s a science, after all, to put together a beautiful cake that has fruit dispersed evenly throughout your batter — a dispersion I personally only achieve half the time. The rest of my cakes yield a “soggy bottom,” as Great British Baking Show judges would proclaim — a layer of sunken baked fruit only welcome in an upside-down cake.

How do you avoid this common baking mishap so that your first slice of cake reveals a perfect crumb dotted evenly with fruit? Deb Wise, a professional baker and cookbook author, shares three simple tips from her decades of baking experience to fight the dreaded soggy bottom and help bakers avoid fruit sinking to the base of their cake.

Meet The Expert

Deb Wise is a professional baker, former recipe tester and developer for Meredith, Inc. (current recipe tester for Frank Content, Inc.), and cookbook author of Incredibly Decadent Desserts

Remove Excess Moisture

Step one of achieving an even dispersion of fruit is to blot away excess liquid with paper towels, says Wise. The first reason for this crucial step is that additional moisture can throw off the chemistry of your cake batter—very specific proportions calculated to yield a delicate crumb. The second reason is that removing extra juice minimizes discoloration in your batter (hello, blueberries!).

Give It A Coat

If your batter is thin, says Wise, any added fruit needs support to help it stay suspended. Otherwise, it will all sink to the bottom. With any recipe, she first considers the thickness of her cake batter and how heavy, or wet, the added fruit will be.

The “added support” comes from tossing the blotted fruit in a thin layer of flour or cornstarch. You’ll find this technique across professional baking cookbooks, but it’s a step often missed by home bakers. “Use a sieve to gently toss fruit in flour or cornstarch,” instructs Wise. “Using a sieve will help prevent over-coating the fruit, which can produce a gooey, or pasty, bite of fruit. It only takes a few tablespoons of flour to adequately coat fruit.”

Why Blotting Works

The flour (or cornstarch) thickens the batter surrounding the fruit, allowing it to better stay in place. It also creates a barrier between the batter and the juice of the fruit—as the fruit cooks and releases liquid, that flour coating can absorb a bit of the moisture and keep the fruit from sliding to the bottom. (The smaller your chunks of fruit are, the better chance they have of floating.) Since you only need a few tablespoons of flour for this technique, you can use a small amount reserved from the recipe itself so that you don’t unnecessarily dry out your baked goods with extra flour.

The trick is especially handy come summertime when juicy, ripe fruit makes its way into cake batter or in the winter when you thaw frozen summer bounty to remind yourself of warmer days. “Super-ripe peaches, plums, strawberries, canned fruit, and defrosted fruit are all very wet and heavy and need help to support them in the batter,” advises Wise.

Sinking isn’t as much of an issue in a thick cake, quick bread, or muffin batter, she says, but there are still some best practices a home baker can employ to ensure an even finished product. Wise recommends filling your baking pan with half of your batter, topping with half of the fruit, and then layering on the remaining batter and fruit. “Gently press the fruit into the batter, leaving some of it exposed,” she says.

When Wise adds fruit to a very sturdy dough, like cookies or scones, she skips the flour coating altogether. “The baked good isn’t deep enough to worry about sinking,” she says. “That said, I still blot away any excess moisture.”

Add Fruit Last

Wise's final professional baking tip for adding fruit to your batter or dough—regardless of whether or not you’re coating in flour or cornstarch—is to gently stir in your fruit as the very last ingredient. This will prevent discoloration in your batter and give the fruit its best chance at suspension.

These three simple steps will make a world of difference to the finished product on your cooling racks, and can apply to baked goods with any kind of heavy or moisture-laden fruit—from Peach Scones to Strawberries-and-Cream Sheet Cake, which were used to test Wise’s insider knowledge.

Just remember: Blot, coat, and add your fruit last to quell any cake-slice concerns.

Related: Cakes

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