The Breadcrumb Hack For Seamlessly Removing Cake From The Pan

Baking cakes, whether it's to sell them as part of your job or just as a hobby, can be a finicky business. You've got to avoid ingredient mishaps that can cause your cake to sink in the middle or that can throw off the taste. And then, once it's baked, even if everything else goes right, you've got to figure out how to finagle your cake out of the pan without it falling apart.

Most bakers butter and flour their pans to help prevent the above scenario from happening. Or they use parchment paper to line the pan. The trouble is that butter and flour can cause untasty clumps to stick to your cake, while parchment paper can be a hassle to wrangle into the pan.

The good news is that, according to Maida Heatter in an interview with Insider, you can use breadcrumbs as an alternative way to coat your pan and prevent your cake from sticking. Here's how to go about it, plus a few ways to get a cake that has gotten stuck in the pan out.

Using breadcrumbs to coat your cake pan is actually an extremely simple hack. All you have to do is grease your cake pan with butter as you normally would. Then, instead of adding a dusting of flour and shaking it around the pan, do the same thing with fine breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs add a tasty texture to your cake in the event that they stick to the dessert, and they also do a better job of preventing your batter from sticking to the sides of the dish.

Now, there are a few stipulations to using breadcrumbs to coat your cake pan instead of flour. For one thing, the key is to use finely ground breadcrumbs. If the breadcrumbs aren't ground finely enough, you may see them on the outside of your baked cake — yuck! Additionally, this trick works best for bundt cakes, tube pans, and fluted pans. So, if you're baking in a different type of baking dish, this might not be the route to take.

In the unfortunate event that your cake has stubbornly stuck to the pan anyway, don't panic. There are still a few things that you can do to get your cake out. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to use a butter knife to carefully go around the outer edge of the cake. This helps loosen it from the pan, making it easier to remove. Just make sure you're not using a sharp knife — this could scratch your pan, causing damage to your baking tools.

Another way to unstick a cake is to reheat your cake. Warming the cake up causes a change in temperature, which can help the cake expand and contract, thus pulling away from the sides of the pan.

Or, you can go the other extreme, and instead of reheating your cake, you can freeze your cake. Freezing your cake helps hold the cake together, making it less likely to break apart as you try to remove it from the pan. Whether you implement the breadcrumbs trick or you just opt for one of these cake pan removal methods, keeping your cake in one piece has never been easier!