Homemade cake is the best! What to do to make yours look (at least a little) like it came from a pastry shop?
Making cake batter is not such a science. All you have to do is preheat the oven, line the cake pan with baking paper and start making the quick dough. And when we say fast, we mean lightning fast… In short, it is enough to beat 6 eggs and 180 g of sugar at high speed. After about eight to ten minutes, you will get a light thick foam. Lightly mix in 180g of sifted plain flour, a pinch of salt, lemon zest and vanilla extract. Then just use a spatula to scrape the dough into the mold, bake at 170 °C, and you have the golden base for your cake ready…
When an ordinary knife is not enough…
Of course, as is often the case, every cake has a catch. And one such is cutting the corpus. If you want to have a dessert filled with cream (or jam), you have to be able to cut it in half lengthwise. Unfortunately, this skill is not easy, because the dough crumbles in all sorts of ways and the round shape often leads to the fact that the knife deviates when cutting and you end up with crookedly halved slabs…
Conjuring with pastry tools
The best tool for cutting a cake is of course a pastry knife that is long and sharp. Professionals can literally do tricks with it and when slicing cakes (even into three parts) they proceed by guiding the knife to the center of the cake and then turning the body slowly around until it is evenly sliced on all sides. Anyway, it sounds nice as a guide, but who among you has a pastry knife at home?
Initial cutting
“If you want to cut through the cake without unnecessary snags and crumbs, use a strong thread. Its advantage is that it can make a solid cut without breaking the structure of the pastry,” says the confectioner and explains how to do it: “First, with a sharp knife, cut the carcass to a depth of three centimeters around its entire perimeter. This gives you a template that gives you a clear direction of the future cut. Then all you have to do is get some strong cotton thread or thin fishing line and get to work.”
The principle of the dumpling method
According to the expert, it is enough to stretch the thread around the circumference into the groove, tie it and slowly tighten it. “Pull the string until you’ve completely cut through the body. It’s actually the same principle as when you cut dumplings with string,” he explains. In this way, you can immediately divide the corpus into several necessary parts. But if you’re a beginner, don’t experiment too much and settle for one cut. Fill the cake, for example, with custard cream (just mix vanilla custard, butter and sugar), cottage cheese filling (mix of cottage cheese, sugar, cream and fruit) or ordinary whipped cream with sugar and thickening cream.
Portion of thread cake
By the way, you can also use the thread for perfect portioning of the individual parts of the cake. Thanks to it, the individual portions will keep their perfect shape and will not fall apart. In this way, you can “portion” the entire cake in advance so that possible guests can offer each piece.
