Tuesday's Tips, Tricks and Tid-Bits ~ Crumb Coating Your Cake

If you regularly read my blog you'll know that one of my favorite things to bake is a cake.  Layer cakes to be exact.  Layer cakes used to intimidate me, but once I got used to them they have become the confection I get most excited about.  And this is mainly because I so enjoy eating them.  And tasting the batter and frosting along the way :)

One of the problems I encountered the most when I first started out was that of getting a good coat of frosting free of crumbs.  And the further along in the frosting process I got, the more the issue snowballed.  Crumbs got back into the bowl and were then just redistributed all over the cake each time I applied more frosting.  It would quickly became one, huge crumb-y mess.

The easy fix for this is to do what is known as  crumb coat.  You lightly coat the cake with a thin layer of frosting, not worrying about any crumbs that might get in the frosting at this point.  Then you stick the cake in the fridge so that the frosting will set.  When you put the final coat of frosting on the cake after it's nap in the fridge you don't have the worry about the crumbs because they are sealed in under the crumb coat.

Tuesday's Tips, Tricks and Tid-Bits ~ Room Temperature Ingredients for a Cake

This week's "Triple T" (tips, tricks and tid-bits...get it?)  post is about the importance of bringing cake ingredients to room temperature.  Now of course there's always the exception, say, if a recipe calls specifically for chilled butter.  But the vast majority of the time you'll want for your eggs, milk and butter to be at room temp when you incorporate them into your cake batter.

Why you ask?  Because when butter is at room temperature you can cream it properly with sugar so that it will hold more air.  If you try to cream cold butter with sugar you will end up with a clumpy, lumpy mess.  When eggs are at room temp they will act as an emulsifier because they can be fully incorporated into the batter.

In layman's terms:  when all of your ingredients are at room temperature they will produce a cake with a more tender crumb, and the cake will also rise to it's highest level and bake more evenly.   And that (to borrow Martha Stewart's famous words) is a good thing.

You can achieve this by setting your eggs, milk and butter out 60-90 minutes prior to baking.  *Make sure you don't set your butter out too soon or it will be too soft.  When you press the butter you should be able to see your finger print indention.  If you press it and the butter won't give it's too cold....if you press it and it completely squashes back it's too warm.*

But what happens when you decide spur of the moment that you want to bake a cake?  Or what about when you need to start baking immediately upon arriving home from a long day's work?  Luckily there are a few ways to speed up this process and cut down on your wait time.

Most people just put a stick of butter in the microwave for a bit to soften it up, but unfortunately this causes different parts of your butter to melt at different rates: the outside will be completely melted and the inside will still be solid.  The best solution is to cut your butter into thin slices (the thinner the better).  More surface area=faster warming time.