Too Much Sugar

In your baking, sugar plays many roles including helping cupcakes and cakes rise to their full potential by raising the coagulation temperature of the eggs in the batter and hence giving the mixture more time to rise and expand before the structure sets.

However, if too much sugar is added (these simple vanilla cupcakes had twice as much as they should have), then not only do they rise to the extreme but the structure takes so long to set (these were baked for 15 minutes longer than a normal batch) that they then collapse dramatically towards the end of baking. The outside was lovely and crunchy, but the inside crumb was still wet, dense and had little volume – certainly not the ideal type of cupcake!