How to Bake a Level Cake

It's great fun to bake and decorate your own birthday cakes, but what happens when the cake comes out of the oven with a mountain in the middle? If you want a nice flat decorating surface, you'll need to cut off the mountain, and then you're left with a smaller cake. If you want to include every morsel of cake in your creation and have a nice smooth surface to decorate you should follow these steps.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Sift your dry ingredients if you are baking a cake from scratch. For some mysterious reason, this often leads to a flat cake.

2. While smoothing out the top of the batter after pouring it into the cake pan, remember to push it toward the sides a little and away from the center. Cakes cook from the outsides in, so more batter on the outside will mean that it will take longer to cook the outside resulting in the outside batter firming up closer to the same time as the inside and thus, each part will hopefully rise the same amount.

3. Place baking strips around the outside of the pan. The baking strips can be found at most craft stores in the baking area. They are soaked in water and also used to help slow down the rate at which the outside of the cake firms up.

Tips & Warnings

• If you decide to use baking strips, remember to follow the manufacturer's instructions.