The heating core is a nifty gadget that helps radiate heat into the center of large or deep cakes, dramatically reducing baking time and allowing for a more even rise and a more evenly baked cake.
This is particularly handy when baking cakes in a home oven or when baking large cakes (like the base tier of a wedding cake), which tend – even when baked in a rotating commercial convection oven – to get overbaked around the outsides. I use this for all cakes greater than 7″ in diameter and deeper than 2″. I grease the heating core inside and out, place it in the center of the pan, and fill it with batter just a little higher than the level outside.
The cake bakes right up around it in 2/3 of the time it would normally take.
After baking, I remove the plug right away to ventilate the hole for faster cooling:
The cake plug pops right out of the element.
Sometimes I need to trim the bottom a little so that it fits most snugly back into the cake.
At this point, I proceed to slice layers as per an ordinary cylinder of cake. Each disk has a small round piece in the middle, which fuses completely once the layers are spread with filling.
Find this nifty gadget on Amazon U.S. here
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Hi! Thank you for the wonderful tutorials! I also read up on how to fill a cake a moment ago and was wondering how many layers you typically get after cutting and leveling a cake that was baked in a 3-4 inch deep pan. Did you bake in two pans to get three layers or was it just one?
Hello, you are welcome! For cakes under 10″ in diameter, I usually bake in one deep pan then cut into 3-4 layers. For wider tiers, I may bake two shallow cakes then cut them into 2 layers each to make 4 layers. Depends on what kind of oven is being used (commercial/convection ovens work better for baking all in one pan).