I'm rounding out my kitchen supplies, filling in some pretty basic holes. Today, two 9-inch cake pans arrived. This means I should be able to pour batter into the pans, bake the cakes, and end up with two perfectly round cake layers that I can simply stack on each other without having to cut the cakes in any way. YouTube baker John Kannel notes there are several ways to bake cakes such that the tops end up flat, i.e., there's no need to run a knife across the top of a cake layer to flatten it out (see one of his videos on the topic here). I'll be studying up on all that and, I hope, baking nicer cakes as a result.
More supplies on the way, including an offset spatula, pastry-dough cutters, a Silpat kneading mat, a veggie julienne peeler (creates strips as it peels), and some nifty-looking toothpaste.
3 comments:
The easiest way that I know of to get a flat top on a cake is to wet an old tea towel and wrap it around the cake pan, fixing it with a safety pin or something along those lines. Cakes rise in the middle because the outside fully bakes before the inside, and this prevents that.
The other side of the coin, of course, is to stick things in the center of the cake that will conduct heat and bake the center more quickly, but that seems a little more finicky to me. I've never tried it, though.
It's almost as if you watched the video!
I didn't actually watch the video, because I'm too lazy. I was just trying to guess what might be in it, and I guess I did that.
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