Welcome to day two of my Cake for Dummies series! Let’s talk levelling.
So why, you may ask, do I need to slice the perfectly delicious top off my cakes? It’s simple: flat cakes stack nicely and will give you a better finished look than if you stack two domed cakes. Plus, slicing off the top enables you to chow down practice quality control on your cakes, so you will know if it is celebration worthy without leaving a tell-tale hunk missing from the finished cake.
Cakes are stacked with the bottom layer being top-side-up and the top layer being top-side-down, like a cake sandwich. Depending on how high the mounds of your domes are, you might have only a very small part of each cake meeting in the middle if you stack them without levelling, leaving a gap around the edges of your cake that will have to be filled in with frosting. If you go that route, you’ll have an unstable cake and will probably have frosting oozing out between your layers, which isn’t a great look. So unless you use Magi-cake strips or similar on your pans and have fairly flat cakes to begin with, I’d really suggest levelling them before stacking and frosting the cake.
Here’s an example of what you don’t want. Although the top cake isn’t top-side-down, which would have made the gap ridiculous, you can see that there is still a big gap between the sides, which makes for too much frosting around the edges and not enough in the middle.
Compare that to this cake I made, which I leveled first. It is perfectly flat after stacking and I used the same amount of frosting over the whole surface of the bottom cake.
This shows the inside after cutting. Although the photo is a hot mess because some very hungry people attacked it with a knife and I took it in bad lighting, the even layers are still more attractive to cut into than the mounded cake in the first photo.
In the photo: Chocolate Ridiculous Cake
All that to preface the video, in which I’ll demonstrate how I level a cake. This tutorial on levelling is the shortest video in the series, so it feels a little funny to give it its own blog and it’s own separate video, but the next is long enough without this one being included, so today is a short and sweet video tutorial day. Enjoy!
I’m using the Large Wilton Cake Leveller in the video. This is the cheaper version I mention.
P.S. Thank you to everyone who has me in a reader for bearing with me overloading your readers while I updated my 2009 recipes to put the pictures back after they disappeared! As of today, I’m done updating all those old posts (as far as I can tell)! If you ever find any recipes or posts missing pictures, please let me know. Thanks again!
Veronica's Cornucopia 
Somehow I’ve evaded domed cakes recently but I love taste testing the levelled off part…so I kind of miss them. Great post!
Also…you won my Saucy Mama mustard giveaway! I’ll be emailing you with further details :)
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Cool beans! The odds were in my favor since so many of my blogging buddies were doing the Saucy Mama giveaway. I was hoping I’d make out like a bandit! lol. Thanks, Joanne!
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I never even knew there was such a thing as a leveler. That is awesome and I can see how you get perfect cakes now. Great videos!
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Your cakes are so beautiful. As much as you’re making the methods accessible to all of us, you still have a wonderful and unique talent for this stuff!
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I have never made a double decker cake. I don’t think so at least. I stick to the 9 x 13 sheet cake. Not nearly as pretty but safer for me not to screw up. So what do you do with the cake that you cut off? I’d eat it of course. :-)
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I almost always make cake pops with my cake domes and then give them away. Sometimes we just frost them with the extra frosting and eat them but not often.
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I always wondered if those levelers were worth the money…now I know! Thanks. I am a knife lever…lol *cringe* lol
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Hey, if that works for you, then go for it! I’m just way too spasmatic to attempt going at it with a knife–my cake would be so wonky.
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What a cool tool! I might have to invest in one. Looking forward to part 3!
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Great tips, Veronica. I don’t have the patience for layer cakes. My only come out “wonky”!
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Fascinating. My cakes look just like your “don’t” picture (at best) and I always just thought that real bakers were better at baking perfectly flat cakes. I feel that I have been let into a secret. Thanks! -kate
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LOL, glad to help!
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I have been enjoying your videos. I am learning from watching you and will now attempt to try to make a layer cake. Thank you for taking the time to do this.
Becka
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Wonderful, I’m so glad that this series is helping you!
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