Caked

Well, I made the Devil's Food Cake. In fact, I made two.

The first time, one of the two layers stuck to the pan and shattered pretty badly coming out. Pieces and crumbs everywhere. I was going to spackle the hell out of it with frosting, but then I thought no, I'll see if I can figure out why it did that. Doing some research, I found some sites that said to get the cake out of the pan after ten or fifteen minutes; others said that you could leave it there. Some explicitly said not to use butter to grease the pan; others said butter was just fine. Some said to use vegetable oil and a pastry brush to wipe it on; others said a spray would be okay. But finally, I came across one that said to butter the pan, and put a layer of parchment paper on the bottom. This made sense to us, and its what we did.

The good news is, it worked. Ten minutes after the layers were out of the oven, I flipped them onto two plates, and they came right out. The bad news (a little) is that they're not really as light as I'd like. I don't know the right buzzwords to use for cakes, but for bread it'd be that the bread didn't have enough crumb texture -- not enough holes in it. I tend to think that cakes should be fairly light, and this wasn't that. I'm not sure how to fix it, and I'm unlikely to start baking cakes just to try out ideas (cakes are more of a committment than cookies or bread). But at least we figured out the parchment thing. Good deal.

Oh, and I tossed the first one.