What Happens If You Forget To Grease Your Cake Pan?
No matter how embarrassing it is to admit, we've all done it. Maybe you were a pre-teen baking your first solo cake, or maybe it just happened last week and you feel like a fool. Forgetting to grease the cake pan happens to us all at one point or another. And yes, it sucks. Perhaps you went to turn the bundt cake pan over and the entire top half ripped from the bottom because it got stuck or you went to cut a piece from the pan only to realize too much of the crumb is on the bottom to be a coincidence.
That moment of realization is the worst, and makes you question your intelligence: How could you have forgotten to do something so simple? But don't beat yourself up. After all, mistakes happen and, at this point, it's almost a right of passage. But let's talk about what happens when we forget to grease and how we can possibly salvage the mess.
It won't come out quite right
Not greasing your cake pan before baking can cause quite a few problems. When a cake bakes in a non-greased pan, it will adhere to the glass or metal instead of having a thin layer of fat or oil working as a layer of defense. So, in your attempt to remove the cake from the pan the cake will struggle to come out, which will often result in the crumb tearing or falling to pieces. Reader's Digest suggests trying to glue the torn pieces of your cake together with frosting, but that will only work if you can remove those torn pieces from the pan without tearing them further and have the skill to put everything back together again.
Basically, forgetting to grease your pan is only a recipe for disaster and if you want a respectable-looking bake, you'll butter everything up before pouring the batter in. But if you absolutely do not have the time to bake yourself a whole new dessert, the Rachael Ray Show has a strange trick to try. The show asks that you fill a pan bigger than your cake pan with hot water and then place your cake pan inside of it, being careful not to let the water come in direct contact with your sponge. Let this twist on the bain-marie rest for three minutes and then try to remove the cake from the pan again.