What To Do and What Not To Do
- Be Prepared.
Read through your recipe completely from beginning to end even the notes.
- Turn your oven on so it’s nice and hot.
- Get all of your ingredients out and pre-measure things.
- You want your milk your butter your eggs to be all room temperature so that they mix nicely and you’re not putting ice cold things in the oven.
Why? Because when you put ice cold ingredients in cake batter and you pop that into the oven the center of your cake takes way longer to bake.
When you’re baking your cake layers you’re going to find the edge sets quickly the middle continues to rise because those ingredients were cold and you wind up with a domed cake which is not fun to decorate, so be prepared.
- Don’t Open Your Oven
Why is that a mistake? You might think you have to open your oven but here’s the deal…your oven should stay closed for most of the bake. If your cake calls for a 35 minute bake time i set my timer for 30 minutes and then I’ll start taking a look maybe the 34 minute mark.
Just keep an eye on it don’t go in after 10 minutes or after 15 minutes because they’re so delicate before the cake has set. If you bump it, or if it cools off just a little too much, then your cake will deflate and it’s not going to come back
Just don’t open that oven too soon.
- Wait For the Cake to Cool Off
You followed your recipe to a “T” and everything came out perfectly and you’re ready to assemble your cake… but the mistake is not waiting until it is completely cool.
There must be no residual heat left inside of that cake because your butter creams and your fillings can melt so easily which will cause your cake to collapse.
- Measure Your Flour
it is so easy to mismeasure it if you’re not using a scale. A kitchen scale doesn’t have to be expensive or take up a lot of room, but does come in handy for measuring one cup of flour. Depending on the kind of flour, a cup should be 120 grams. If you just scoop the flour and level it off then you might find that it weighs 150 grams because it was packed down. Then your cake will be dry, denser, and bread-like.
- Don’t Over-mix Your Batter
If you look at most recipes they’ll say mix until combined. Your cakes would be better if the instructions said “mix until almost combined”.
It’s better to just fold the ingredients by hand in until all the flour has disappeared and stop.
If you over mix your cake batter then you’re going to develop the gluten which is a protein in your flour. Gluten is necessary in bread because you need to have that nice chewy texture that makes bread so amazing, but cake is supposed to have a melt-in-your mouth texture.
Don’t over mix your batter. Mix it until it’s just combined.
If you don’t make the other mistakes listed above then you’re going to have a great time in the kitchen.
Have questions? Leave them in the comments below and be sure to check out our other tips and tricks.