I get asked this question ALL THE TIME: what’s your biggest tip for people who want to bake?
Sheesh! That’s a doozy of a question. Baking cookies is totally different than baking cakes and bread, that’s a whole other animal, so giving one tip sounds as hard as picking one favorite movie or song (which I can’t possibly answer either). But if I had to pick one insider’s nugget of wisdom, here it is: put a belt on your baking pans.
Whaaaat? I know. I had never heard of this before I started doing this professionally.
If you’ve ever baked a cake, you probably have found that they don’t come out of the oven flat. They get a dome at the top, which makes stacking layers difficult to say the least. Either they slide or the whole thing looks crooked. Not a good look. One option it to use a serrated knife to level the cake layers, removing that domed part and making a flat surface. Another is to avoid that dome altogether!
The baking belts or strips do just that. The way they work is that you get them wet before wrapping them on the cake pan and placing it in the oven. Without the belt, the batter bakes at different speeds. The outer edges bake faster than the middle, which creates that dome shape. The strips make the whole cake bake at the same speed so they come out flat! Tah dah!
You can buy the strips online and I can completely vouch for them. It’s such a time saver to not have to level the cakes anymore and none of it is wasted too.
Have any of you used these before? Do you love them as much as I do?
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