How to cut sponge cake? – Here are the best tips!
Cutting sponge cake can be a game of patience for beginners. But even experienced hobby bakers sometimes have a hard time with this undertaking. There are various reasons why a sponge cake is not easy to cut, but even more tips and tricks on how it works in any case. We reveal both the reasons and the tips so that your cake base can be divided perfectly - in this blog post!
Preparing the biscuit base for cutting - what to consider?
The most important thing is not the tool for cutting a sponge cake, but the consistency of the baked cake. In any case, the biscuit base must be completely cool before it can be cut properly. It is best to stand still for several hours. It would even be ideal to bake the sponge cake a day before the actual completion of the cake and let it rest for a long time before it is cut.
If a sponge cake is cut open while it is still warm, it can simply break apart and crumble – as can also be observed with pound cake. But the same thing happens when it has already cooled down but hasn't been standing long enough.
The point of letting it rest is that the cake can firm up in its structure. The fresher it comes out of the oven, the less stable it is. If it is left overnight, its structure can stabilize and the ingredients bind together more firmly because excess moisture is bound again.
Of course, it can also happen that a cake cannot be cut because it did not rise properly or collapsed again. This can have many causes. An overview:
- bad biscuit recipe
- Egg mass not beaten long enough
- Dough not beaten loosely enough
- when adding flour, baking powder, cocoa, etc., beat the dough too long (or beat it at all and did not fold it in)
- Unsifted flour, baking powder and cocoa
- the wrong baking pan
- Door of the oven opened during the baking process (ough collapses and stays that way, offended by the disruption)
How to cut sponge cake?
If the biscuit base has risen well and it has been allowed to cool and rest for a sufficiently long time, it can be divided horizontally into several cake base layers in different ways.
Probably the easiest way is to use a long, sharp knife to cut the cake. This takes a bit of practice because the knife has to pierce the edge of the cake base absolutely straight and it has to be divided very carefully.
Summary
In order to be able to cut a sponge cake, it should first have risen well, cooled down and rested long enough. Only then is its consistency and size correct to be able to cut several cake bases from the sponge cake.