20:41
Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen, I'm going to show you how to make perfectly flat cake layers. Let's get started. If you've ever made a layer cake, you know they can get wobbly once the top is domed. This is my chocolate zucchini cake, and you can see baked with cake strips perfectly flat cake layers. All that frosting is basically level throughout. This is a tall cake. It's big. It's heavy. But, it stacked up and was super stable. This is so easy to achieve if you just use cake strips. Baking up flat cake layers is one of those many little things you can do when you're baking to get a beautiful and really delicious end result with less frustration in the kitchen. So, in
this video, I want to show you with the same batter in the same oven how the layers will bake up differently using no cake strips, homemade ones, and store-bought, and you can decide which one is best for you. When you bake a cake, this metal exterior will heat up first. So, the outside of your cake starts baking ahead of schedule. By the time the center is done, the outside has been finished for a long time, which means that it's going to be a little bit harder, crustier, and drier. The other part of this is this baked first, so it got set into place. The center continued to rise slowly, so it domed. This isn't the of the world, but now you have crumbs from trimming your cake, you have the wasted cake that you
trimmed, and the outside of your cake is going to be kind of crunchy and dry, not soft and melt in your mouth. Cake strips are just insulators. We're going to wet these fabric strips, wring the excess out, and wrap them around our edge. So, you can buy these online. I have a link in the description box below, but they're so basic. They're just layers of fabric formed into strips, and you can either soak these for 5 minutes or you can hold them under water and ring out all the air. See the little bubbles coming out? Bubbles. When you're ready to use these, ring out some of the excess water. They should be damp, not soaking wet. Then, just wrap them around your pans. And now, this will cool the edge at the
beginning of the bake so everything can bake evenly. Instead of heating up, the metal will stay relatively cool on the edge, meaning that the cake can rise evenly and you won't have a dome. If you want to make a cake right now, or you just don't want to buy one more thing for the kitchen, that's fine. You can make these at home. Let me show you how. I'm using 6-in pans today, but you could use any size you'd like. Cut a length of foil that's about like 4 to 6 in longer than you need. We don't need all of this foil, so you can cut it in half lengthwise for two strips. And now, some kitchen towels are best friends here. I would say these are semi-disposable,
so they will last for maybe like eight to 10 bakes before the foil starts falling apart. This gets folded now twice lengthwise. All you have to do is stick that in water, get it wet, and ring out some of the water, so it's now very damp. Pop that into the middle and I can trim the excess out. And two. This will work basically just as well as a fabric cake strip. So, wrap this around your cake. Like that. And now we can fold once and fold twice, just so this holds together. Super easy and you will see the results. Like I said earlier, we're
going to test this out, so I'll bake all three layers, one with no cake strip, one with the homemade and one with the store-bought and you can see the difference. If you're handy with a sewing machine or know someone who is, you can make a fabric cake strip so easily with scrap fabric. I would just recommend using cotton and then several layers, almost like you're making a quilt, but instead of batting on the inside, it's just more cotton layers cuz you want to hold onto the water. Sew the edges and then some bands that you can use for adjustable settings, so you can just slide them right on. It's like you're making a super simple fabric belt. If you've done these, send me some photos. I could post them on my Substack
and uh share. If you're making flat cake layers, you might as well prep your pans properly. So, grab some baking spray or butter and flour them. We just don't want them to stick. The best thing you can do is a round piece of parchment right at the bottom. This almost guarantees nothing bad will happen. Your cake cannot physically stick in the pan. Even if the side it sticks somehow, just use a little knife, free it and they'll pop right out. Repeat this for all your pans. And for today's video, I'm not going to go and like make cake batter from scratch for you. I'm almost done
whipping up a batch of my favorite vanilla cake from the blog, and we can pop this right in and get it into the oven. [snorts] By the way, if you want more videos showing you little baking hacks and things you can do, maybe I need to revisit my how to decorate a cake video with you. Let me know in the comments. Okay. My pans are prepped. Let's grab the batter. I'm not going to take you through how to make cake batter. I have plenty of videos for that. But one thing I would say that's related is over-mixing your batter.
You don't want your cake to dome, but you also don't want it to come out of the oven looking perfect, and then as it cools, it shrinks back down into a gummy puck. That's what happens when you over-mix your cake batter. Here's my recommendation. Mix until you have some streaks of flour left on top. Take a look at this. That looks like some streaky nonsense, but that's okay. You're going to scrape the bowl down and finish this by hand, so it's perfectly mixed. Just use your spatula, give it a scrape, and finish mixing things together. You want a nice homogeneous consistency throughout. Ready to pour. If you're using cake strips and you also like using a scale to measure out the exact amount of batter for every pan
like I do, unnecessary but it doesn't hurt. Just do that without the cake strips on because they tend to be like different lengths and different weights, have different amounts of water in them, and it throws the weight off. Today we're going to eyeball it, so it doesn't matter. Popping these into the oven. I'm even going to take a time-lapse for you so you can see how they dome up differently. Bake according to your recipe. However, if you're using cake strips, you often have to add a couple extra minutes of bake time because this is cooler and it just takes a little bit longer to bake. Use the same test as always, either a skewer inserted in the center coming out clean or springing
back once you press gently. In you go. Out of the oven, cooled, and I hope you can see these cake layers that we made with the fabric and the homemade cake strips are nice and flat and you'll notice how pale the side is. These are really soft, fluffy cake layers. They baked up nice and even. They're perfectly flat. Excellent for stacking. They sit right on top of each other and there's no need for trimming. When you look at the two layers baked with a cake strip or without the cake strip, you can see the difference. This is domed, much more crusty and tough on the outside, and it even bakes a little bit lower. If you stack one of the layers on top of the domed one, you can see much less stable and
it's going to be trickier to make a layered cake. It's going to tend to kind of go off to one side and lean and your life is a little bit more difficult. If your cake layers are domed, it's not the end of the world. You could use more frosting, you could chill the cake as you build it so that it's not wobbly, and of course, you can trim the top off. Grab a serrated knife or a cake leveler and just cut the cake down. Personally, I don't want to cut the whole top off because this edge is listen to this. That's a crusty, hard cake layer. But, for the sake of decorating, we can just trim the top off.
I hope you had a chance to make some beautiful flat cake layers using cake strips, homemade or bought. If you like my videos, hit that subscribe button and check out my cake playlist.
