The effect of the study variables on cake volume, baking loss,
density, and height are shown in
Table 2
. Freezing led to a decrease
in the volume and height of both layer and sponge cakes. This effect
has already been reported by
Zaehringer and May
fi
eld (1951)
and
Moore et al. (1954)
in layer cakes. The differences of volume
observed in our study did not reach 10%. In contrast, no differences
of volume were observed between cakes stored for 30 or 100 days,
with either type of cake, although there was a reduction in the
maximum height. This indicates that when the storage time
increased, cake shape was
fl
atter Storage temperature only affected
the layer cakes parameters, in which the lower the temperature the
smaller the differences with cakes from non-frozen batter These
differences followed the same trend as with batter density, and
volume differences due to the freezing/storage temperature were at
least partially due to differences in the air trapped before baking.
There was a 99.9% signi
fi
cant correlation between batter density
and cake volume in both types of cake (
r
¼
0.64 in sponge cakes;
r
¼
0.63 in layer cakes). The resting time of batters, given that the
changes in density were not signi
fi
cant (sponge cake) or only
reached 2% (layer cake), had no effect on cake volume or height.
This appears to indicate that the effect of freezing on cake volume
was not due to the periods between cake-making and freezing, or
between freezing and thawing, but to the freezing process known that cake volume depends on the air incorporated to the
batter, on the air retained, on the air produced by the baking agents
during processing, and on the formation of a stable structure during
baking (
Stauffer,1990
). In view of our
fi
ndings, it would appear that
the principal factor that affects the quality of frozen batter cakes is
related to gas retention during cake baking, which is lower in the
frozen-batter cakes due to the larger bubble size in both layer
(Fig. 1
) and sponge (
Fig. 2
) cakes.