Ready to roll up your sleeves and get baking? Read our quick tips for making cakes that turn out beautifully and taste like a dream, every single time.
- For lightly colored tender cakes use shiny pans, which reflect heat. Dark pans or pans with nonstick coating absorb heat faster than shiny pans and can cause cakes to brown too quickly.
- Fill cake pans only half full with batter. If you fill it too full, it will overflow. If you don’t fill it enough, your cake may turn out flat.
- Always bake cakes on the center oven rack.
- Cool cakes on wire cooling racks to allow for air circulation.
- If you leave your cake in the pan for too long and it sticks, try reheating it in the oven for 1 minute.
- To remove cake from pan, insert knife between cake and pan, then slide around the edge to loosen. Place wire rack upside down over cake. Invert carefully so cake is on rack and remove the pan. Invert onto another rack and flip cake right side up.
- Cut cake with a thin, sharp knife in gentle sawing motion.
- Refrigerate any cake that contains dairy products in the filling or frosting.
- Store layer or tube cakes under a cake cover to keep fresh or improvise with an inverted mixing bowl.
- Serve cakes with fluffy frosting as soon as possible, because cake will tend to absorb this type of frosting. You can also store this type of cake under a cake cover or mixing bowl but slip a knife under the edge, so it’s not airtight.
Craving a little more instruction? Continue on to Cake-Making 101. Then, comb through the rest of our cake recipes.