Make your cakes turn out level

I really enjoy baking and decorating cakes, especially for my family’s birthdays. I had the joy of making a Lethal Peppermint Cake for my daughter Emily’s 19th birthday a few days ago. It’s important to have the cake level, especially if it’s a layer cake. If you follow the usual instructions in a cake recipe, it usually turns out humped in the middle. Although you can level the cakes with a serrated knife or a cake leveler, I’ve learned a few tricks that invariably give me a nice, level cake that I don’t have to trim down, like this:

How you want the cake to look - level with pan

There are two things I do. First, after pouring the batter into the pans, I wrap them with damp cloths. This somehow distributes the heat more evenly through the cake. I just use strips of old terrycloth bath towels, which I wet and then squeeze until damp. Then I wrap around the pan and secure with a safety pin before baking. Don’t worry, it won’t catch on fire!

Cake pan wrapped with cloth

Second, I always – no matter what the recipe says – bake the cake at 300 degrees for twenty minutes, and then I turn the temperature up to 325 degrees until the cake tests done. Generally another 20 minutes for two layers, and 25-30 minutes for a 9×13 sheet cake. This works because at a high temperature, the leavening agent works more rapidly, making the cake rise quickly in the middle. So lowering the temperature makes it rise more slowly and evenly. That’s why muffins are baked at a high temperature – so you get that quick rise that gives the muffins their characteristic peak.

I have tried just wrapping the pans and only changing the temperature, but it works best to do both.

By the way, I didn’t actually decorate Emily’s cake because it was iced with a delicious peppermint ganache. (I have never tried piping ganache out of a cake decorating bag, and I don’t think I want to try it.) But I did find some really cool candles at Walmart that gave it some pizzazz.

"Stacked Stripes" party candles by Cake Mate