Ingredient functionality in batter-type cake baking: Coupled multiphase poro-hygro-viscoelastic model

Abstract

Ingredients play a crucial role in cake baking, significantly impacting important metrics like oven rise, moisture content, and color. While there is existing knowledge, a comprehensive mechanistic understanding of the intricate relationships between ingredients and the underlying physics is needed. We use a porous media-based multiphase transport framework coupled with large-strain viscoelastic deformation to study how water, sugar, and fat influence cupcakes’ height, weight, and color starting from the batter stage. We show that high water content batters have an expedited oven rise due to increased thermal diffusivity leading to faster heat transfer and higher evaporation rates but lower surface temperature relative to low water content batters and, thus, less browning. High sugar and high fat batters have a delayed batter-to-foam material transformation because of increased starch gelatinization temperature, leading to shorter and drier cupcakes because of higher vapor loss early in baking. We find that lowering water or increasing sugar or fat content in the batter gives darker cupcakes because of increased surface temperatures. The novel mechanistic understanding of ingredient functionality can extend to mechanistic understanding and optimization of other baking processes.