I feel so silly asking this, but here goes anyway. I'm working on a brand new recipe for a food column. Cooking i have no trouble with, actually, I'm pretty good at it! but baking... oh dear. I can follow a recipe no problem, and i've made delicious cookies, brownies, cakes, breads and muffins. even slightly altering a recipe seems to be ok. but coming up with a recipe from scratch seems like I'm in way over my head. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't copying any existing recipes and doing it completely from scratch is the only way i know how to do that. I do have a somewhat rudimentary understanding of some basic baking principles, so I thought I would just throw together all the things i've learned from my baking experiences over the years and see what would happen. Here's the recipe I came up with from scratch just as a starting point (not that it's anything impressive, lol). I did bake this cake and it came out dense and rubbery and gummy. The flavor was disappointing as well. I was just wondering if you could tell me where I went wrong. 1 3/4 cups cake flour 1/2 tsp baking powder 2 lg eggs 1/3 cup honey 1 cup mott's unsweetened applesauce 1/4 tsp salt 1/4 tsp ground ginger 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon 1/4 cup olive oil 1 tsp lemon juice 1 1/2 tbsps brown sugar 1/8 Cup apple cider i baked it on 325 for about 8 minutes, realized it was probably too low, then raised the temp to 365 for another 5 minutes and then thought it should be even higher, at 375 where i baked it another 17 minutes. again, i know practically nothing about baking so if the above ratios seem ridiculous it's because this is the first time i've attempted anything like this. to be honest, i was surprised that something with a form that was somewhat edible came out of the oven. I'm thinking it could have been anything from not using the right flour (i used cake because in my research i found that it's supposed to rise better and result in lighter cakes), or whipping the batter too much ( i did everything by hand because i wanted to make sure it would be slowly incorporated), or using too much liquid, or fat, or maybe the honey+ olive oil meant too much dense liquids, i don't really know. any amount of advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

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