Erin Mann is baking a new cake every week for a year from the "All Cakes Considered" cookbook and shares her adventures here on AnnArbor.com. Read past columns here.

In my early twenties, I acquired about a dozen vintage sewing books from an acquaintance who was going to leave them out by the roadside for the morning garbage pick up. Their trash was certainly my treasure. I read both the original Vogue and Singer sewing books pretty much cover to cover and taught myself to sew. To this day, I still refer to those books when I’m working on a sewing project.

Melissa’s neighbor, Julie, discovered a 48-page pamphlet called “200 Classic Cake Recipes” while cleaning out her mother’s old cookbooks. The humble 35-cent pamphlet, put together by the Culinary Arts Institutes in 1969, was Julie's trash. “With its recipes so simplified they might as well be haikus,” the pamphlet quickly became Melissa’s treasure.

The sour cream spice cake deviates from the usual method of mixing; no creaming of butter and sugar here. Instead, I melted and cooled the butter according to the recipe, and combined it with all the other wet ingredients, including the sour cream. Next, I mixed all the dry ingredients together and gradually beat those in to the bowl with the wet ingredients. What a simple batter to put together!

After baking for 30 minutes, I removed the cakes from the oven and set them on cooling racks. While cooling, I started cleaning up the kitchen and washing dishes. When I returned to the dining room to check on my confections, I found two spice cakes with sunken middles. What a bummer.

I turned to two cake all-stars to troubleshoot my cake mishap. According to the cake troubleshooting guide in “The Cake Book” by Tish Boyle, common causes of sunken centers are: leavening problems - it's stale or there is too much or the batter was overmixed. Rose Levy Berenbaum, author of “The Cake Bible,” adds that a too cold oven can also be the culprit.

I concluded that the oven temperature caused the cakes to fall. Prior to baking the cakes, one of my housemates used the oven to heat up her dinner. The oven temperature was set to 450 degrees Farenheit. After she finished, I turned down the oven, opened the door for a bit and then used my thermometer to check the temp had fallen to 350 so I could bake the cakes. Maybe I should have waited longer for the temperature to change, and I should have read the oven thermometer more than once.

To compensate for depression (mine and the cakes’), Tish Boyle suggests topping with extra frosting or fresh fruit. I trimmed the cakes around the edges with my serrated breadknife to level them somewhat, and then I frosted the heck out of ‘em. The frosting was a buttercream with added orange extract and a hefty amount of dried orange peel (three tablespoons) that gave it a bright, citrusy flavor that paired well with the spicey cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves in the cake.

Erin Mann is ruining diets one cake at a time with her weekly baking adventures. Email her with your baking wisdom at SheGotTheBeat@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter. Facebook users can also keep up-to-date with A CAKE A WEEK by joining the group.