New to baking - cake not rising :(

[Nige]

Hi,

My 12yr old daughter and I are having a laugh baking when she visits, but a lot of the cakes we make don't rise properly

I've read a bit on here, searched and read some more.

We dont live at altitude, don't open the oven door until it's time, don't crash about a lot.

We do always use the right type of flour (plain or self raising), good quality sugar of the specified type. Butter is always unsalted.

We have an electric fan oven and place the mix on the middle shelf.

We just tried a great recipe from the BBC Good Food website
It ended up about 1" to 1.5" tall unlike the illustration, it was delicious but much more like a brownie than a rich cake. There was no baking powder stated in the recipe - could that be the problem???

I really wish that we could have some more success, so any and all tips to keep this dad/daughter baking team on the right road would be much appreciated.

TIA

NOTE: I couldnt post this with a url, so the site is bbcgoodfood dot com
look for "A reliably good buttercream sandwiched between two layers of gratifyingly chocolatey sponge makes this close to the perfect cake"

• 250g self-raising flour
• 250g unrefined soft brown sugarn
• 50g cocoa
• 250g plain chocolate
• 250g butter
• 4 eggs

Mix the flour, sugar and cocoa together in a bowl. Melt the chocolate and butter together with 200ml water in a pan and then beat this along with the eggs into the dry mixture. Pour into the cake tin and bake for 1 hour or until a skewer comes out clean. It may crack a little on top but this will be covered by the icing. Cool.

I then placed in the oven at 140c for 1 hr

[Finmar001]

I think you should try to read more about your oven. An oven with a fan takes less

time to bake. I think one hour for a plain cake is too much

[LPBeier]

I have a "fan oven", or as we call them convection, and I found out early on that they don't do cakes very well unless you turn the temp down 25 (farenheight) and also check the cake 15 minutes before the alotted time. If your oven works both with or without the fan, I would turn it off for your cakes and you will find your results more to your liking. If not, experiment with the lower temps and as Finmar suggests, shorter times.

[Nige]

I did as the recipe suggested, and turned the heat down from 160c for a conventional oven to the 140c for my fan assisted. So one would assume that the temperature was correct?

From the little I know about baking doesn't the rising happen at the start of the cooking, so reducing cooking time wouldn't help ??? But if that was a general hint, thanks that is one of the I do know , maybe i'm not as green as I thought ?!?

I'm quite happy to be shot down in flames here, just looking for an answer

Nige