Cooling and Removing Cakes

While the cooling process naturally happens when we take our cakes out of the oven. I'd love to share a few tips and tricks with you on how I like to cool my cakes in order to maintain moisture and keep those cakes nice and delicious. I'm Rachael Teufel and let's head into the kitchen so we can talk all about cooling our cakes. Once you have removed your cakes from the oven, you want to place the pans directly onto a cooling rack. And the reason for that is simply that you want air to be able to circulate underneath them and allow these pans to cool a little bit, first of all, so you can handle them. But also because we want to try to stop the baking process. So these pans coming out of the oven are very hot and the cake on the inside of them will continue to bake. So refer to the baking lesson, if you'd like to learn a little bit more on how to kinda judge that piece of it. But when we are removing pans from the oven, they definitely need to go on a surface that allows air flow so they can start to cool. I recommend leaving your pans on the cooling rack for 10 to 15 minutes, just as they are like this. And once the pans are cool to touch, which at this point they are, or you can go ahead and just flip your cake and pan over. And usually what I try to do then is just lift this up and make sure that the cake has released from the pan. And if for any reason that your cake does not release from the pan at this point, just running your knife along the inside edge will help release anywhere where maybe you were a little thin on your cake release. Maybe it just had a lot of moisture in there and it got stuck. But that's a one little trick just to kinda get that pan to release. But I then let my cakes continue to cool until they're cool to touch. So, you know, that first 10 to 15 minutes is really just to let most of that heat evaporate and escape from your pans. And then I flip them over. And the reason I flip them over is because locking in all of that moisture, so when heat is releasing from a cake, it's actually releasing in a moisture form as well as just a heat form, which means that if you leave your cake sitting like this for an hour to two hours, all of that wonderful moisture that you have in your cake is just going to evaporate off due to the release of heat. And so when you flip this over, it traps the heat inside of your cake and it traps moisture as well. And so then you have a very moist cake after about an hour to an hour and a half or so. Leaving it like this, you've just created this lovely sort of enclosed space for the cake to reabsorb any moisture. And so you can probably see a little bit here. There is definitely moisture on the inside of this cake pan, and that's really just from the heat and the moisture releasing out of the cake. It rises up because heat rises and it gets trapped inside the pan. And then it condensates, come back into moisture, and it goes back right inside of your cake. So that is one of my tricks for making sure that my cakes are moist. So even if I have over baked them just a little bit, the cake itself is still very moist because of the process that I do here. So this just gives you a little bit of leniency with your baking times. If you've over baked a cake, then putting it in this position really allows that moisture just to be reabsorbed into your cake in the way of heat and steam. So just one quick tip for you. Now, once your cakes have cooled for about an hour to an hour and a half, and again, you want those pans to be sort of room temperature. You want to be able to touch them. Then you would go ahead and continue by wrapping and storing these. I promise if you use just a couple of these tips I've given you, you will have beautiful, moist and delicious cakes just by changing the process of how you cool your cakes. If you're looking for more information on how to make sure that your cakes stay moist and delicious, I encourage you to check out the video "Wrapping and Storing Your Cakes".