I've Got OCD: Obsessive Cupcake Disorder!

I've made about four dozen fairy cakes over the past few days, possibly more because I've been sending the excess cakes to work with my fiancé.

I'm going a little mad in the search for the perfect fairy cake: fluffy yet moist, tall and rounded, and deliciously sweet but not sickly.

However, the oven in my current house has become my worst enemy: recipes that worked like a treat in my mother's and two of my previous homes' ovens are routinely failing in my current oven. I think all my experiments are to be done anymore in my mother's oven because I no longer have access to the ovens in my previous rental homes, obviously!

Here is a batch of cupcakes using the traditional pound cake recipe: a quarter pound each of sugar, flour, eggs, and butter. I'm not a fan of pound cake, personally, but normally it turns out nicely in my mother's oven. These however were simultaneously peaked and flat, and dense in texture.

This batch was made using my Madeira cake recipe. These too had noses, which I couldn't work out how to prevent.

On the right hand side is a batch of cakes using the light sponge cake recipe that I normally use for fairy cakes, which normally works in my mother's oven, but in my oven they were dry, dense, and flat.

This final batch is the same recipe, however the baking powder in the recipe was replaced with a quarter teaspoon of baking soda for every quarter pound of flour. The rise on these cakes was much more even, but in fear of the cakes deflating after coming out of the oven I overcooked them and they were dry.

I think I'll have to redo all my tests in my mother's oven and see what the issue is because I'm at my wit's end. I cannot find a way to prevent my cakes from:

• Either rising flat, or peaking and growing 'noses'
• Being too dense, or too dry
• Shrinking or flattening after cooking.

The tests continue......