If you bake cakes with any frequency, you know how how tricky it can be to divide the cake batter evenly between both pans. Eyeballing isn't always accurate, and trying to measure it in cups can get messy. Most happily, there is another way!
Going by a tip from this year's holiday issue of Fine Cooking, we have started weighing our cake batter with a kitchen scale. We weigh the bowl by itself before we begin and weigh it again after we've made the batter. Subtracting the bowl's weight, we know exactly how much our batter weighs.
Then it's a simple matter of dividing the batter between our cake pans - by weight. This works perfectly every time without any of the guesswork we've relied on before.
By the way, this is also a great trick to use for dividing bread dough, quick bread batter, or any other baked good that makes more than one loaf or cake.
Related: How to Make Your Own Cake Stand
(Image: Flickr member Southern Foodways Alliance licensed under Creative Commons)
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How have I never thought of this... thank you! I am definitely going to do that!
What I really want to know is...
How do you get a cake to bake flat on top? You know... so you don't have to slice off a chunk to layer it.
@christinalouise
I haven't really needed to trim a cake since I leveled my oven! There will sometimes be a troublesome lump here or there, but that is just a minor annoyance.
It is amazing what a difference you can make with a level and a couple wood shims (my oven did not have the adjustable screw feet that a lot of newer ones have).
Weighing the batter is a great idea. I've often thought how nice it would be if pan manufacturers put a line or tick marks on the inside of the pans for comparison. I've been using the same layer cake pans for forty years, so I've learned to gauge the batter accordingly.
But you should hear the story about the time I baked a 12-cup pound cake in a 9-cup bundt pan ...
@christinalouise: a trick i was recently taught in pastry school to keep cakes from "mushrooming" is to use a bowl scraper and drag some of the batter to the top edge of the pan, all the way around. your cake batter will look inverted when it goes into the oven, but will rise much more evenly. You will probably still want to even out the top for a perfectly straight layer cake, though.
You can use cake strips, which help the heat distribute more evenly in the pan and helps prevent doming: http://www.realbakingwithrose.com/2007/07/roses_heavenly_cake_strip.html
Another great reason to have a kitchen scale!
If you don't have a scale, the other option would be to "deal" out the batter with a scoop. (one for this pan, one for this pan...) These scoops are very popular for portioning anything in a commercail kitchen. The scoop method especially helpful if you are making a big cake that doesn't fit on the little digital scales most popular among home bakers.
If you have a digital kitchen scale, you should be able to hit tare before adding the batter and it will magically subtract the weight of the container for you! :)
I just use the exact same pans for all the layers since they weigh the same -- and weigh the final batter pan. Easy to adjust the amounts after you've plopped the first round in.
I was waiting for this post to load, thinking "weigh it" - and luckily we are on the same side here. It's so hard to eyeball these things in the kitchen and the value of having a trusty kitchen scales cannot be underestimated!