Want to get the perfect dome? – go have a serious word with your oven

So, in the begininng I made alright cup cakes. They tasted nice, I covered them in sparkly bits to make them look pretty, everyone ate them. But hiding underneath all that Dr Oetker jazzle was a sorry secret. My cupcakes were flat. Flat as a witches whatsit. Indeed sometimes they weren’t just flat but they 'splayed'. Yes that right, much energy appeared to be going into pushing outwards into a mushroom shape rather than upward into the ideal aesthetic for the top of a cupcake.....the dome.

To begin with I told myself it didn’t matter; my little deformed creations tasted nice and no one complained. But as with most things I do in life, I soon started to pile on the pressure. My cupcakes had to be perfect. The flat topped mushroom shaped cupcakes of the early days were good enough no more. And so I began my research (with the help of Google) into the mysterious art of achieving ‘the dome’....

Turns out it’s not all that mysterious at all really; the oven wasn’t hot enough.

The oven said it was hot enough, but the oven was lying to me. I proved this to myself and the oven by sticking my new oven thermometer in, turning it up to 170c (no fan) and watched in wonder and amazement as the oven beeped at me to tell me it had reached its designated operating temperature, when in reality the little swine was running at approximately 140c!!! Another 10 minutes went by before I final gave in and twiddled the knob as it was quite clear that my oven had no intention of ever doing what I’d asked and held its ground at a stead fast 150c.

So in my house if you want the oven to run at 170c you have to turn the dial to 190c. It’s fine. This is not a particularly arduous solution to a small problem and it means that from that day to this, every batch of cupcakes has come out with a dome Sir Christopher Wren himself would have been proud of.  

So, there you go. Hopefully if you stumbled across this post on your own quest to create the perfect domed cupcake it’s been of some use.

I bought my oven thermometer from Amazon, I paid a fiver, but now you can get it for £2.70. Brilliant!