It’s one of those sayings that you hear and acknowledge, file away and tend to forget in the process of testing recipes, making marketing decisions, buying supplies and all the myriad decisions involved in getting a business up and running, even if it’s nothing more than a tiny, hobby-based business.
Small things matter. And they add up. As a pilot, I know this. And when I’m flying, I make absolutely certain that I’ve checked off ALL the small things. Miss a small thing and it’s the first step in leading to a catastrophic failure. It’s what’s known as Dr. Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model of failure. Miss a small step and it leads to a slightly larger problem, which can then lead to an even larger failure and finally to disaster. If all the holes in the slices of Swiss cheese, which represent barriers to failure, line up, you crash. In baking, you end up with a mess, an inedible lump of product.
So, imagine my surprise when, in my slow progress in learning better baking techniques, I found out about one of those small things that make for more even baking and less wastage of the final cake. Cake strips! Yes, cake strips. Who knew?
A cake strip seems such like such an absurd little thing to be able to make such a difference. It’s nothing more than a simple thick fabric band, soaked in water and then wrapped around the outside of a cake pan. It’s something we never discussed in my baking course in college, but maybe we will in the new program. I first heard about these little miracles of common sense from one of the YouTube channels I subscribe to, Preppy Kitchen (https://www.youtube.com/@PreppyKitchen).
So how does a damp piece of cloth make such a difference? Well, it’s another of those science of baking secrets, similar to why you use room temperature ingredients rather than eggs, butter and milk straight out of the fridge. It’s all about temperature control. Specifically, the internal temperature of the batter as it’s baking. If you use cold ingredients, the middle of the cake takes longer to bake, because it has to heat up before it actually begins to bake. And that’s how cake strips work.
We’ve all seen cakes bake. The batter goes into the oven and the cake bakes from the outside inward. And we all know that as you bake a cake, the outside of the pan gets hotter first and then, by a simple process of heat radiation and conduction, the outside of the batter begins to bake faster, and as the heat works its way inward, the center bakes later. And, of course, as it does, it rises more than the outside edges of the cake, leaving a dome. Now, the cake looks great, tastes great and, if you want a domed cake, it’s perfect. But what if you want a flat top. Because trying to stack a series of domed layers of cake is a pain in the butt and slicing the dome off the cake, leaving an even, flat top, is an even bigger pain in the butt, a waste of cake and, if you add up all the cost of ingredients you’ve wasted in that discarded dome, bloody expensive. Not to mention you also have a darker, slightly more cooked edge than the rest of the cake. Plus, as you cut the dome off, it creates crumbs and exposes more of the inner cake, which leads to a greater chance of crumbs falling off the cake into the icing, a cake decorator’s nightmare.
Enter cake strips. These wet strips of fabric absorb some of the oven’s heat and keep the edges of the cake slightly cooler, thereby evening out the baking process so the entire batter bakes at a more even rate. Slower, more even baking means a more evenly coloured edge, less doming, which tends to flatten out as it cools, and a more even texture and moisture throughout the entire cake. No cutting, less crumbs. What more could a cake decorator want?
See how a small thing can make a huge difference? In better cakes, more efficient time management, less wastage and less decorating headaches.
Like I said, small things matter.
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