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How to bake a good cake. (1 Viewer)

A great way to ensure that you bake a good cake is to do the following:

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Oven

Always always, always yes, that's three times always pre-heat your oven before baking. Thus ensuring that your creations will bake in a tempered environment, giving you the best results.​

Tins or Pans

Only use quality tins, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and with tins, this is a must. To create the perfect cake, you will need to invest in at least one good tin as cheap tins can warp in the oven causing odd shapes of cake, and degraded tins can start to shed their coating and cause havoc with your bakes.​

Lining or Greasing

Line or grease your cake tin/pan - To prevent your cake from welding to the tin while baking, there are a few things you can do to prevent this from happening.​

1) Grease your tins with either a cake release spray or cooking spray and then line the base of your tin with baking parchment paper before pouring in your cake batter.​

2) Another cake release tip is to coat your tin in some form of greaser but then lightly coat the tin in flour once you have greased it.​

3) Another way is to fully line your tin with baking parchment. Please note that if you use greaseproof paper, you will need an additional greaser to prevent the cake from sticking.​

Now you've got the oven set and the right tin the next bit is to ensure you get rid of any air bubbles!​

Air Bubbles in Batter

Pockets of air can get trapped in your cake batter/mix when you have been whisking it, so to prevent craters or large air holes appearing in your cake there are a few things you can do.

1) Take a knife and run it in an 'S-shaped' motion through your mixed cake batter, this will 'pop' any air bubbles that are caught in the mix.

2) Either that or you can hold either side of the tin (once you have poured the batter into it) and bang it a couple of times on your work surface, this causes the trapped air to rise to the top, and they will pop that way.

Baking

Always bake cakes on the middle shelf of the oven unless otherwise stated. For large-capacity ovens, always check the manual and see where the manufacturer says the best shelf to bake on is. On large-capacity ovens, it can usually be the shelf below or above the centre, depending on what you are baking.

Testing your Cake

Once you have been baking for a while, you will know when your cake has fully cooked; however, for newbie bakers; it is worth keeping an eye on your baking and doing a skewer test to see if the cake has fully baked. Your cake can sometimes look fully baked on the outside but is gooey in the centre. To check for this, remove your cake from the oven and close the door immediately (this keeps the oven hot while you work out if the cake is baked or not). Now, take a metal skewer and insert it into the cake. If it comes out gooey with cake batter on it, then the cake has not yet fully baked. If it comes out clean or has little crumbs of cooked cake on it, then the cake is done and should be removed from the oven.​

If your cake has baked for the full amount of time, but you have a gooey mixture on the skewer, put the cake back in the oven and bake in 5-minute increments (i.e. put the cake in for five minutes, then take it back out and do the skewer test again. If it's still gooey, bake again for five minutes and then do the skewer test again, do this until the cake has fully baked). Please use a clean skewer each time.​

Resting your Cake

Once your cake has fully baked, place the tin on a wire rack that has a wet tea towel on it and then walk away. Yep, that's right, get as far away from that cake as possible because if you don't, you'll start poking and prodding and wondering if you can get the damn thing out of the tin, but DON'T DON'T DON'T you dare touch it. If you do, it will obliterate right in front of your eyes. I know because one, I don't have patience and two, I have done it and then been dismayed.​

Once the cake has done leave it in the tin for about 10 minutes, that is, unless you have made a Victoria Sandwich, which you can pretty much take out of the tins after a few minutes. By allowing the cake ten minutes to cool it will start to shrink away from the cake tin/pan, allowing the cake to slide out of the tin easier, but only if you leave it alone for the required time!​

Cooling your Cake

Now that the cake has had time to settle, place a wire rack over the top of your cake tin and flip it over so that the cake pan in upside down. Then lightly and SLOWLY start to slide the tin away from the cake. If you have done all the above steps correctly, it should just slide straight out.

Once you have removed the tin, slowly remove the parchment paper. If you have covered your cake or the base in it, I usually slide a palette knife between the cake and the parchment paper to prevent the cake from tearing when it is being removed. After about ten minutes, flip the cake over the correct way to allow the bottom to cool fully.
 
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