Prepping Pans

Prepping your pans to bake a cake or even cupcakes is a super easy process. There are a couple of different ways you can do that. And I'd like to share that with you. I'm Rachael Teufel and let's head into the kitchen for prepping our cake pans. There are a few different ways to prep your pans for baking.

The first way is a very traditional way, which is simply greasing your pan with some shortening or butter, whichever your preference is. The tendency is to use shortening more so to prevent any of the butter from burning. Butter has a lower temperature at which it burns compared to shortening. So just do a nice, generous layer of shortening. And then you want to pour in just a little bit of flour, and then you're going to shake it around.

You want to make sure that you're getting a nice coating and then you want to turn it on its side, tapping it works really well. And then just let that flour coat the inside edges as well, making sure that you get your corners and then you can just tap out any excess. And now you have a pan that has been fully coated and prepped, ready for cake batter. This is probably the most traditional way to do it, and certainly how I did this many years ago, when I was baking with my grandmother. This was just the way that we did it until products like this came along.

So this product is a baking spray that also has flour in it. And there are lots of different brands. There's also a... Most of our baking brands also sell their own product of this, but this is just a cake... a spray.

And so you just want to make sure you spray the inside. Again, getting up onto your edges as well. And that again just creates a lovely coating to prevent cake from sticking to your pans. It helps just release things very easily so that you don't have to stress over your cakes coming out of the pan. Another way to be able to prep your pan is actually using parchment paper.

And so parchment comes in sheets. It comes in a big, long roll. It also comes in cake circles. So you could certainly purchase cake circles as well. I tend to just cut what I need.

My real preference is just to use the spray because it's so fast, quick, easy. It does the job really well, and I've never had issues with it. You certainly can use parchment paper and what I'm going to do in order to show you how to cut the size for your parchment, is just fold it in half and then fold it in half again. And then I like to just basically eyeball the center point. And so I know the width of this is actually, well, the diameter is six inches.

I'm going to fold it one more time and then you can either use, you can either use a marker to mark it, or if you're like me and you just want to eyeball it, you can eyeball it. And then I just sort of cut at a roundness that is going to give me something very similar to what is on the outside of the pan. Then you just unfold it and you can just tuck this right down inside. If it fits, wonderful, if it doesn't, you can always trim this down again. You can also let it kind of rise up on the sides of your pan, just a little bit as well.

And that just helps your corners come out really nice as well. And then you can also do a strip on the inside if you choose. Again, it seems like a lot of excess work, in my opinion, when something like this is so easy to use and readily available, but some more traditional pastry chefs and bakers out there do prefer the parchment, and that's completely fine. If you don't want to let that rise up on the side, once you mark... If you saw me, I just sort of ran my finger around and marked it.

You can fold it back up and you can see exactly where that line is and you just cut it again. And now this is going to sit very nicely, right in the bottom, it'll be completely flat and be able to protect your batter from sticking to the pan inside. While prepping your pans is certainly an easy process, it is an important step to ensure that your cakes come out of your pans in one piece. Please, please, please make sure that you prep your pans appropriately, so you don't end up with any disasters on your hands.