4 Easy Ways to Keep Your Cake From Sticking to the Pan

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It’s pretty normal to want to bake cakes from time to time as a tasty treat for the entire family to enjoy.

Your cakes are likely a very big hit, but it can be kind of a nuisance when you have trouble removing the cake from its pan. If your cake just seems to keep sticking to the pan, then you might be wondering what you’re doing wrong.

There are actually several things that you can do to keep this from happening to you.

Keep reading to get all of the information about how to keep cake from sticking to the pan. You’ll feel much more confident in your ability to bake cakes that will be easy to enjoy for all.

1 – Consider Using Parchment Paper

Perhaps the best thing that you can do to keep cakes from sticking to pans is to utilize parchment paper. Parchment paper is very inexpensive overall, and it winds up doing a great job of preventing your cakes from getting stuck in the pan.

All you really need to do is cut the parchment paper down to the right size so that it will fit in the bottom of whatever pan you’re using to bake a cake.

You can easily trace the bottom of your cake pan with the parchment paper so that you can cut out the perfect shape. Most people use a permanent marker to trace the shape of the pan, and then they proceed to cut the parchment paper using a pair of kitchen scissors.

Once this is finished, you’ll be able to place the parchment paper on the bottom of the pan to get better results.

Just line the bottom of the cake pan with the parchment paper so that you can avoid having issues with your cake sticking. Parchment paper isn’t the only thing that you should do to help with this process, but it is very helpful overall.

You can go on to the next steps without utilizing parchment paper, but it’s highly recommended to use the parchment paper if you have some.

2 – Greasing Your Cake Pan

Greasing your cake pan is the next important recommendation that you need to go over. You have a few options when you’re getting ready to go through this process. You can grease your cake pan using vegetable shortening or you can utilize standard butter to get this done.

Many bakers prefer to use vegetable shortening for this process because they seem to get better results. Water can cause the cake to stick to the pan, and butter is made up of more water than vegetable shortening is.

Thankfully, vegetable shortening isn’t going to add to or detract from the taste of your cake in any way.

If you think that using butter will make your cake taste better in the long run, then you’re probably not exactly right. The amount of flavor that would be added to your cake from a thin layer of butter on the bottom would be very minute.

In fact, you might not even wind up noticing it at all, and that will make using the butter more impractical when compared to using the more reliable vegetable shortening.

Once you’ve chosen what you want to use for your cake pan, it’s simply going to be time to smear the butter or shortening on the cake pan itself. It’s usually a good idea to try to get both the bottom of the cake pan and the sides of the cake pan.

You’ll find that cake can stick to the side of the pan sometimes if you don’t do a good job of greasing it.

As a bit of extra advice, try not to use so much vegetable shortening or butter that you can see thick concentrations of it on the pan. You want to create a thin layer of vegetable shortening or butter to act as a greasing agent.

If you use too much, then you might wind up not getting the perfect results that you want.

3 – Sprinkle Some Flour as Well

It’s also going to be beneficial to go ahead and sprinkle a little bit of flour on the bottom of your pan.

A small amount of flour can be sprinkled directly on top of the butter or vegetable shortening that you’re using to grease the pan. You should maybe have around an inch of flour coating the bottom of the pan to have this work out correctly.

Don’t skip this step if you want to ensure that your cake will be easy to get out of the pan. It doesn’t take all that long to sprinkle flour at the bottom of the pan, and you almost surely have extra flour if you’re baking a cake.

You’ll be glad that you took the time to do this when your cake comes out of the pan very easily after it has come out of the oven and cooled off.

4 – Use a Non-Stick Pan

Of course, some people absolutely love to use non-stick cake pans that are designed to be easy to use.

These types of cake pans have a special non-stick coating that is made to prevent things from sticking to them. You should have an easier time getting a cake to come out of these pans without sticking at all.

If you have the choice to use a non-stick cake pan, then you should probably go ahead and try it out. Overall, the non-stick cake pans that are on the market work very nicely to help you remove cakes without it being a hassle.

However, you shouldn’t expect the cake to absolutely never stick to these types of pans.

Non-stick cake pans might be easier to use than standard cake pans when you’re trying to avoid having cake stick to the pan, but that doesn’t mean that they’re perfect.

Sometimes you might encounter an issue where the cake will stick to the pan despite it being a non-stick pan. This is why most experts and baking enthusiasts recommend greasing your cake pan no matter what.

If you want to ensure that your cake isn’t going to stick to the pan, then the most reliable thing to do is to go ahead and grease it.

The methods for greasing a cake pan mentioned above are very simple, and you can easily combine this with the benefits of a non-stick cake pan. It gives you an even greater likelihood that you won’t have to worry about a thing.

Advice for Removing Cake From a Pan

It’s also true that how you go about removing a cake from its pan can make quite a bit of difference. If you want to ensure that your cake gets removed from the pan without sticking, then you need to be patient.

First, you should know that you need to wait at least 15 minutes for the pan to cool before you try to remove the cake.

Once this is done, you’re going to want to take a thin knife so that you can loosen the edges around the pan. This is going to be true whether you’re making a circular cake or a rectangular cake.

The size isn’t really going to change how you should go about readying the cake to be removed from the pan either.

After you have done a good job of loosening the sides of the cake from the pan, it’s going to be time to remove it. Some people will flip the cake pan upside down so that it can gently slide onto a plate or cooling rack.

If you’ve greased the cake properly, then it shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish this.

You could also flip the cake pan upside down while holding your hand underneath the cake. Slowly lower your hand and gravity should help you to remove the cake from its pan. You can then safely set the cake down on whatever surface you’re planning to place it on.

As long as you’re being careful with how you’re going about this, it shouldn’t be too hard to get good results. If the cake is still sticking to the pan after all of the above advice, then you might have done something wrong or missed a step.

Check to see if you greased the pan properly and try to remember to go through all of the steps to get better results next time.

Enjoy Your Delicious Cake

Now that you know how to remove a cake from the pan without having it stick, it’s going to be easier to just focus on enjoying your delicious cake.

Your cake is something that can bring the whole family together, and it’s great to be able to remove the cake from its pan without it being a hassle. The next time you bake a cake for your loved ones, you’re going to have a much easier time than before.

Following the advice listed above is all very easy to do, and you’re going to remember the steps from now on in all likelihood. It becomes second nature to do these things while baking a cake after a while.

Every cake that you decide to bake is going to be so much easier to get out of the pan.

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