If you like to bake, Central Oregon can crush your enthusiasm, along with your cakes, cookies and breads. Baked goods crafted from conventional recipes frequently fall and flatten here.

Our high altitude is to blame.

Home cooks and bakers have to learn how to tweak ingredients for baking success.

In general, it’s a matter of decreasing leavening and sugar, and increasing flour, liquid and baking temperature.

Here’s why: Bend is 3,625 feet above sea level, Redmond’s altitude is 3,077, and Sisters’ is 3,100.

Contrast that with Portland and Seattle, both at or near sea level.

You don’t have to be a scientist to understand the impact of High Desert altitude on cooking, you just need a good cookbook like “High Altitude Baking, 2nd Edition,” edited by Patricia Kendall. As Kendall, a registered dietician, explains, a high altitude means less air pressure exerted on everything, including the food you cook.

Kendall explains the three main impacts of decreased air pressure on food preparation:

• Leavening gases expand more quickly in baked goods, and therefore may burst and cause food to fall before the structure is set.

• Moisture evaporates faster from foods, so flour is drier, and dough may need more liquid.

• Water and other liquids boil at lower temperatures, so food takes longer to cook, and a bowl of hot soup, for example, won’t be as hot. When canning or making candy, the home cook has to make a safety adjustment for the water boiling at a lower temperature and cook the food longer.

We called Kendall at her home office in Fort Collins, Colo. (elevation: 5,003 feet), to clarify her strategies for high altitude baking.

She’s the associate dean for research at the College of Applied Human Sciences at Colorado State University.

Kendall told us the key to baked goods that don’t fall is slowing the rise.

“To do that, put in less leavening so it doesn’t rise as fast. You can dilute the leavening by adding more flour and more water.

“It takes some experimenting, although I think that it’s important that if you’re increasing the flour, you always want to increase the liquid, too, because otherwise you’re doing to have a drier product. If you add a teaspoon or tablespoon of flour, do the same with the liquid,” Kendall said.

In her book, Kendall notes that increasing the baking temperature also helps, especially with cakes.

“Increasing the baking temperature by 15-25 degrees helps set the batter before the cells formed by the leavening gases expand too much,” she writes.

See the chart on Page F1 for Kendall’s recommendations for adjusting recipes for high altitudes.

Sugar is decreased at higher altitudes because the greater evaporation of water in places like Central Oregon results in a higher concentration of sugar in baked goods, which can weaken the cell structure of the food.

“Therefore, sugar is decreased and liquid is increased when adapting sea-level recipes. Fat, like sugar, weakens cell structure. Rich cakes made at high altitudes may need less shortening, oil, butter or margarine (1-2 tablespoons less per cup). On the other hand, because eggs strengthen cell structure, the addition of an egg to a sea-level recipe may help prevent a ‘too-rich’ cake from falling” at higher altitudes, she writes.

The good news about all of this adjusting is that it makes the baked goods healthier with less sugar and less fat.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any hard and fast rules to guarantee that baked goods will turn out perfectly if you do one thing or another.

When baking cakes or other items from store-bought mixes, Kendall said to be sure to follow the high altitude instructions, which will generally recommend adding more flour and water.

Rest assured that if you were a good baker before you came to Central Oregon, you can be one again. It will just take repeated experimentation to learn how to bake the high altitude way.

“It’s worth the trouble to learn a new technique. You don’t have to miss out on baked goods. Once you know how to do it, it’s kind of fun to make the adjustments,” Kendall said.