I wanted to make a cake to serve my friends as my party (which ended up getting postponed due to covid testing. Everyone was negative 😀 ). I decided to do a basic butter cake and ice it as a drip cake. I looked at the batter I made and thought “Ahh poop this isn’t going to give enough height for the drip effect!”. I had been scrolling Pinterest for inspiration on decorating and came across a ‘hack’ for making your cakes flat on top and have soft sides. Basically, you put something wet around the outside of the pan to stop the sides from heating up too quickly. I figured this would also help give my cake more height, as it would rise more before becoming too hard and cooked. Unfortunately, I did not have a control cake (having enough batter for a control would have made this particular experiement unnecessary), so I don’t know if it actually gave more height or if this is just how this batter worked out. Not a great scientific method, but what does it matter when I’m not trying to get this peer reviewed anyway? Enough of this though. What did I do, and how did it go?
First I got some paper towel and checked whether it ould make it around the tin. It didn’t so I chopped it in half to make 2 lengths. Luckily the width wasn’t and issue as my tin is super shallow, so even a quarter of the width of a paper towel was still too big! To stop the paper towel burning I wrapped it in alfoil, again cut in half to give extra length. Before wrapping it, I wet the paper towelso that it was dripping wet. I laid it in the middle of the foil and folded the foil over it. Then I added an extra fold to make it fit under the lip of my baking tin. I placed the tin and wrapping on a baking tray to stop the wrapping from falling off!
So how did it go? Well, my cake rose to the top of the pan beautifully, however due to the shortness of the pan itself the cake then domed and cracked. The sides of the cake are beautiful and soft and rise the whole depth of the tin. I’m pretty happy with the result! Maybe next time I will use a deeper pan and see whether it stops the doming.
Beth's Baking 