- [John] Today I'm showing you how to get my signature
flat cake layer.
This is what happens to a lot of people
that don't use cake strips.
You get a domed cake.
It's darker and harder on the outside,
and it's not flat and fluffy on the edges.
You really want a nice moist cake
that's moist through and through without having to cheat
and pour sugar water on top.
I don't do that because my cakes are moist.
Anyways, let's get started.
Okay, there's a couple different ways to do this.
One, buy some cake strips.
These are just fabric strips and there are tons
of companies that make them.
Mine are from Wilton and I'm not getting paid to say that.
Although, I should be.
(laughs)
So, anyways, I like the set because they move.
So, you can do a nine inch cake,
and eight inch cake, a six inch cake,
and you just, you know,
adjust.
Then you just dip it in water and you're going to
cover the outside of the pan with that.
But what if you don't wanna buy some?
What if your handy or you just don't feel like
buying extra stuff?
Then you can make your own using tinfoil and paper towels.
Which is what I did for like years.
And I'm going to show you that too.
When you're making your paper towel tinfoil situation,
you're going to use a pan and basically figure out
the length of the pan on the exterior edge.
You can do that just by wrapping
a paper towel around it like that.
It doesn't have to be exact,
it could be a bit over.
(rip)
More than enough.
Totally good.
Wet the paper towel and wring it out,
so it's not totally soaking wet, but still wet.
Then, the hard part is to
unfurl it since it's kinda wet now.
And we're going to fold the paper towel.
(soft music)
Fold it so it's about two inches.
Now, for the tinfoil, which is super crinkly,
so I'll say this first.
You're going to get enough tinfoil,
so that you have maybe two inches on either side free.
Put the paper towel on top and then start folding.
Basically, you wet the paper towel and now you're
wrapping it in tinfoil,
which will hold the moisture in during baking.
That's it, you're done.
Now, you have your homemade tin foil and paper towel
baking strip and it was basically free.
Let me show you how to wrap it around
and then we get to the fun part.
So, just place your pan sideways,
wrap the tinfoil around it and then crimp the edge
a few times so that it holds its place.
If yours is way too long, go ahead and cut it.
It's not a big deal.
And then just fold the edge underneath
so that it is kinda like really in place
and you don't want it to slip off.
Fabric version works exactly the same way.
I like to soak them for awhile,
so they really get wet.
So, soak.
You'll see the water get absorbed and then after
a few minutes, just wring it out.
Leave some water in there,
but you just don't want it to be sopping,
dripping wet.
After you're done, apply to the pan
and you're ready to pour your batter in.
If you're wondering why cakes dome in the first place,
let me tell you, it's super fun.
Okay, so, when you put the cake in the oven,
the outside bakes faster than the inside
because it's exposed to the heat of the oven
where the inside is insulated
by the cake batter surrounding it.
So, what happens is, that the outside bakes first.
The moisture goes away.
It forms its little cakey texture and it's frozen
while the inside bakes slower and continues to rise,
which is nice, in that it's nice and fluffy,
and the outside is burnt,
but we want a uniform bake.
So, how do we do that?
We do that by cooling the outside the cake with water.
So, you use something that'll hold water on to the
outside of the cake and then you'll get flat cake layers
that are really fluffy on the outside,
not caramelized, not dark.
Like almost like magic.
Okay, for demonstration purposes I'm going to make
three cake layers.
One with the fabric strips on.
Get it on tight.
One with my homemade tinfoil version.
And one will be sacrificed and makes me so sad to do this,
with no cake strip, so it's our control
and you're probably going to see some doming and
some kind of crunchier edges,
which I hate,
but it's just to show you that's how much I care.
All right, making my favorite vanilla cake.
So, as a bonus you can make this recipe
and enjoy the most moist and delicious vanilla cake ever.
Okay.
Starting off by sifting our dry ingredients.
1 2/3 cups of all-purpose flour.
One heaping teaspoon of baking powder.
And one heaping quarter teaspoon of baking soda.
One cup of granulated sugar.
And like a generous pinch of salt.
Sift through that.
(soothing music)
Give it a nice sift.
Siftings nice because you make sure that there's
no lumps and it also premixes things.
So, you're extra sure there's no big hump of
leavening agent hanging out anywhere.
We're going to give this a quick whisk and set aside.
For the wet ingredients,
I'm adding in half a cup of sour cream.
Which adds a lot of moisture.
Half a cup of milk.
I'm using three egg whites for this recipe,
you can totally use eggs whole if you want,
but for vanilla cake I love it to be nice and light
and not a yellow cake.
Some people love yellow cakes though,
so if you do go ahead and use the whole egg
and half the sour cream.
Three teaspoons of vanilla extract.
And now three quarters of a cup of basically melted butter.
You can melt it all the way if you want.
(clinking)
Gonna give it a nice whisk and we're almost done.
(clinking)
All right, this is all whisked up.
Now, we're going to combine and we're done.
But first, I have to prep my pans.
When I prep my pans all I do is butter and flour them.
That's all you need.
And kind of even it out with my fingers.
This works really well if you're um
using harder butter.
Mine's room temperature though,
so, just word to the wise.
There's lots of different cake release sprays
you could do too,
but those are not like natural ingredients,
so I would skip those.
And now, for my last pan the control.
I feel so sad it's like throwing a cake away
'cause it's not going to be nice and
fluffy on the edges like it should be.
Grab hold of the flour and just kick around in the pan
so that it coats the butter.
(clanking)
Now we're going to combine our wet and dry
and give it a nice mix.
(clanking)
To get those perfect even layers,
I'm actually going to take the cake strips off
pour the batter in and then measure it out with
a kitchen scale to make sure each weighs the same.
Then put the strips back on and then bake them.
Now we're reattaching our cake strips to two of the pans.
And they're going to go into the oven.
I will tell you that sometimes when using cake strips,
you have to increase the bake time a bit because you're
cooling the outsides so give it a few more minutes.
Just take it out.
Test the center to see if it's springy
and you can also watch the edges because they should
be pulling away from the sides.
These are going to go into the oven at 340 Fahrenheit
for about 35-40 minutes depending.
Okay, so my cakes are out of the oven and I have to tell you
look how sad this is, this is the naked one
without the cake strips.
It's all just brown and stunted and low and not happy it is.
Let's take it out here.
(splat)
Look at that color.
I mean it smells good,
but do you see how this is like,
it's like not as fluffy as it should be.
Like, look at this dome.
Do you see that dome?
That's not cool.
You have to like cut it down and it's like a waste.
Now you have crumbs, okay.
Sorry I sacrificed you.
Next, the Wilton cake strips.
(bangs)
(taps)
So, you can see--
I'll flip it over so it'll be fair.
So, you should be able to see nice flat layers,
crazy dome.
Not cool.
And here we have our tinfoil version and you can see it
baked it nice and flat and still really soft.
So, both ways work really well.
I'm going to tell you that the tinfoil one doesn't
last forever you get like five bakes
and it kinda disintegrates.
So, I don't know if you can see this,
but this is the naked version.
And you can see, like I feel it,
I don't know if you can see how like hard the edge is.
This is the cake strip version.
And this is the other cake strip version.
Whether or not you're going to buy cake strips,
make your own out of tinfoil, or fabric,
or whatever else you want,
I hope you give this technic a try because it really
improves the quality of your bake.
Your cake will rise up more, it'll be softer,
and you'll have a nice flat top
which is so easy to decorate with.
No more cutting.
Thanks for watching.
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