the 10 things I wish I knew when I started baking cakes

I’ve loved baking since I was a young girl and likely inherited the passion from both my grandmothers who are avid cooks and bakers. There’s just something so calming and magical about baking, especially baking pies and cakes, though today we’re going to focus on the latter. I love the methodical measuring of ingredients, watching the yolks transform to that pale buttery color as they are whisked, the sound of the butter crunching together with sugar, and of course, licking the bowl. If you don’t lick the bowl, are you even living?

But, my road to becoming a decent baker has been lined with plenty of mishaps. There was the time I spilled a huge bowl of pancake batter on the floor in 6th grade (pancakes are a kind of cake, right?); the time some cakes exploded in the oven in 11th grade. There were plenty of burnt and deflated cakes. And then, there was my burgeoning interest in making marshmallow fondant after watching Cake Boss in 2010 that led to the creation of many a fondant cake, including one memorable one shaped like a piano for my partner’s birthday fully equipped with a fondant figure of him. However, it ended up sloping to one side and melting, ending up looking like a VERY unsettling Salvador Dali painting. (I tried to find photos but failed, so you’ll just have to take my word for it– it was horrendous).

There are so many things I wish I knew at the beginning and I’m still learning to be honest. This past weekend I made my mom a tiered lemon curd cake with coconut frosting, and while it wasn’t perfect I could recognize how far I’ve personally come. And so, I thought I’d share with you all the 10 things I wish I knew when I started baking cakes.

1. You know the step where you are supposed to mix the dry ingredients first, and then the wet separately and combine them in a certain order? Yeah, do that.

I used to think that I was sneaky by skipping steps to avoid dirtying an extra dish. I would toss the salt and baking powder into the wet ingredients and then add the flour. Or, if I was feeling extra brazen I would mix things out of order. This is a bad idea, and until I stopped doing this my cakes always ran the risk of being uneven, dense, or dry. Chemistry is at the heart of baking, and so you need to respect the recipe and do the steps in order because if you mess with the gluten matrix, bad things happen.

2. Don’t overmix

Speaking of the gluten matrix, you don’t want to over mix your flour in the final steps. In fact, don’t use a mixer at all but instead, take a spatula and fold the dry ingredients into the wet and mix it just enough. If you don’t feel ever so slightly uncomfortable that you may not have mixed the batter enough, you’re probably overmixing.

3. Don’t trust the timer or your oven 

You need to be diligent about staying near your cakes. I always set the timer for literally half the time the recipe calls for and then do a visual inspection through the oven window before I determine how much longer to bake it. With that said, to avoid a deflated cake, do not, I repeat do not open the oven. Been there, done that. And while some people think that the toothpick test should come out perfectly clean, I always try to air on the side of caution and take it out when there’s still a bit of crumb on it. People seem to forget that the cake will continue to cook for a few minutes when you take it out of the oven, so it’s worth it to be conservative.

4. Let the cakes cool completely and use the freezer to firm them up

I never used to let my cakes cool… I know, what was I thinking? You don’t know how many cakes ended up disasters due to rushing the final steps. What can I say, I’m impatient. But, if you don’t do so you will end up with a big goopy mess. You want to let the cakes cool and then stick them into the freezer for an hour or two so that they firm up, which makes it easier to shape. This leads me to:

5. Shape your damn cake

No one in my own family taught me this and it’s a GAME CHANGER. Once your cake is completely cooled and has spent a couple hours in the freezer, you need to use a sharp serrated knife to level, tort and stack your layer cake. This video does a great job of showing what that process looks like, and you don’t want to skip it or you may end up with a sloping, lopsided cake. Just be sure your freezer is clean so that your cake doesn’t end up tasting like that old pack of frozen veggies that’s been in there since 2009. Better yet, cover the cake when you put it into the freezer because I frankly don’t trust any of you, let alone myself.

6. Ingredients matter

Don’t skimp on the good stuff. Your cake is only as good as the ingredients in it, and if you’re going to take the time to bake a cake, you might as well use quality ingredients. I would say if you’re on a budget, just be sure that you don’t skimp on anything that lends flavor to your cake, for example, the chocolate, fruits, vanilla, extracts, etc. 

7. Be prepared for a lot of dishes

Maybe it’s just me, but my sink is always completely full after baking a cake, which is why it’s not a bad idea to bribe the people who intend to ingest your cake to help you do them in order to earn a slice, just like the little red hen. I think this is a totally reasonable boundary. If they aren’t going to help sow the wheat, they get no bread, riiiight???

8. Keep a journal with recipe notes

This one is something I forget to do myself from time to time, and then I always regret it later when I want to go back and make the same cake. Every time we bake we extract little gems of knowledge; things we may want to do differently. There is rarely a recipe that I now make that I don’t adjust in some way. So, keep a little journal where you can save favorite recipes and take notes for next time. 

9. Tools Matter

I avoided buying a piping set and proper tools for baking for the longest time, using pyrex baking dishes, a butterknife for the icing, and a ziplock bag for piping. But if you really want to level up your skills, you need to level up your tools. Everyone should have a piping kit with different tips, dowels, ample parchment paper for lining their cake pans and aiding with decorating, an offset spatula, a bench scraper, and a lazy Susan turntable for starters. I also just can’t imagine life before my KitchenAid as well.

10. Be patient, set realistic expectations and have fun

I am a type-A perfectionist and I’d be lying if I said my baking exploits haven’t occasionally led to tears as I finished a cake and it looked more like an entry for Nailed It instead of the polished, glistening cakes in Martha Stewart’s magazine. This leads us to: have realistic expectations and be ready to practice and fail on repeat. So many things affect the outcome of a cake especially as you start to delve into more complicated recipes using fondant, homemade curds for fillings, different buttercreams, etc. Things beyond your control like altitude, room temperature, humidity in the air can all affect baking, which is why it’s such a fascinating (and maddening) art. So have fun, try not to take yourself too seriously, don’t overcommit or try a challenging new recipe for a major event, and as always remember that at the end of the day you can at least lick the bowl and try again!