Cakes on a Plane!
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Lessons learned
I made mistakes, so you don't have to…
OOPS! #1: Breakage
What happens when you try to remove a still warm cake from its pan. To test for coolness, I touched the top of the cake only. If I had touched the bottom of the pan, I would have felt residual warmth and known that the cake wasn't ready.
Although I had to bake another cake (this was too broken to fix, especially as the top tier) these cake shards ending up making an easy, beautiful, yummy dessert when layered in a glass bowl with whipped cream, left-over raspberry filling, and a healthy dose of raspberry liqueur. We enjoyed it after we returned from the wedding, for dessert after a dinner of fresh Copper River salmon.
I hadn't timed my batter mixing correctly, so I covered the creamed butter and sugar with a cloth and let it sit while the previous cake finished cooking.
Only when I knew I could put the cake right into the oven did I finish adding the dry and wet ingredients. Chemical reactions take place as soon as you combine ingredients, so leavening can be wasted if you leave the filled pan sitting around without oven heat.
Covering the mixer with a towel is also a good way to keep flour, cocoa or powdered sugar from flying around your kitchen while you're beating together ingredients.
I should have baked one of the 14" layers first, before the 6", 9" and 12" layers, to free up the pan for the second 14" layer. This would have allowed enough time for the cake to cool completely and then for me to clean up the pan and mix up the batter for the second 14" layer after baking the other tiers. However, since I went in "logical" ascending order, I had to cool this 14" layer as quickly as I could to get the pan ready for its second baking session. Fortunately, the windy cool summer nights here in San Francisco meant I didn't have to wait too long.
I assumed that each stick of butter was 4 ounces, since that was what was printed on the label and what could be deduced from dividing 1 pound into 4 sticks. A skeptic at heart, I decided to weigh one of the sticks just to be sure…and lo! each stick weighed 6 ounces. I don't know how a fifty percent differential across 8 pounds of butter might have affected the cakes, but I'm darn glad I didn't find out.
June 2006
© Thy Tran