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Want to know how to make a cake rise evenly? I use Wilton Bake-Even Strips, and I’m going to show you just how much of a difference they can make when trying to bake flat cake layers.
Today is my birthday, and every year on my birthday I usually bake myself a cake. My husband always offers to get one for me, but since I truly enjoy baking, I look forward to doing it myself. This year, however, I decided to make cake pops. I love them, and haven’t made them in years.
Since I would just be mushing the cake up anyway, I figured that this was the perfect opportunity to show why I always use Wilton Bake-Even Strips when I make layer cakes.
The concept behind these strips is simple: they even out the temperature of your cake batter. The outside of the cake tends to get hotter faster and bake sooner, giving the slower-cooking middle of the cake more time to rise. That’s how you end up with a domed cake.
To get flat layers, you wet the Wilton Bake-Even Strips and wrap them around each cake pan, securing them with included pins. The water helps keep the outside of the pan cooler a little longer, giving the middle of the cake time to catch up.
Now, I’ve seen advice online for DIY versions of this, using wet towels or wet strips of newspaper. Do they work? I have no idea, because when I tried to do the newspaper version I ended up with black fingers and disintegrating newspaper, and when I tried the towel version I could get them to stay on.
But the Wilton strips are super easy to use. You just run them under cold water, wrap them around your pans, and stick the pins in to hold them in place. The side that faces in is the side that absorbs the water. The silver side goes out. (At least on my old ones it does. The new ones are purple.)
Here are the cake layers that I baked today.
Huge difference, right?
These strips are really durable, too. I’d originally bought two packages probably a decade (or more) ago, but since I’m usually only baking two layers at a time, I’ve never even opened the second package. The first two strips have been used over and over and still work perfectly!
If you’re doing a rectangular cake in a big pan, you can pin two strips together to make one long strip. And Amazon sells a set with four different round cake pans and four cake strips.
Of course, if you don’t have to cut a huge dome off of your cake, you won’t have anything to snack on. So use these at your own risk!