DIY Bake Even Strips

I was reading a cake forum earlier this week when someone mentioned that they tie a strip of wet towel around their cake pans to ensure an even rise when baking. This piqued my interest as I hate levelling cakes. I have a cake leveller from IKEA that does the job fine, but if I could sidestep it (and the little cut-offs that more often as not make their way into my mouth lately) I would be a happy person, of course I'd still have to torte my cakes but that is easy peasy and far less messy.

Wilton make these things called Bake Even strips, basically (and I'm going here purely on pictures I've seen on the internet) they are strips of fabric (I think heat resistant?) that you soak in water and then pin around your cake pan. When you put a cake in the oven, it cooks from the outside in. The sides of the pan get hot and cook fastest, this limits the rise on the rim of the cake, the middle part cooks more slowly and so continues to rise long after the outside has stopped, thus you end up with a domed cake that needs levelling.  Bake Even strips keep the outside of the pan cooler and allows you to achieve a more even bake. They also cost around £9.

The cheaper option is to make your own. Today I decided that I would try to give this a go. First I cut a strip of old tea towel, soaked it, squeezed the excess out (not too hard, you want to thoroughly wet, just not dripping) and secured it around my tin with some safety pins.

The cake came out pretty well, I got a better rise than I usually do, but it still needed a little bit of levelling.

I have a lot of cakes to make this week so I decided to try again, this time I would cut the strip wider.

It rose magnificently, right to the top of the tin and quite uniform across the top but then it all collapsed. I took it out and cut it to see what had gone wrong. An inserted skewer was coming away clean but once cut I could see that, in the words of Paul Hollywood, "it's basically raw."

The lesson here? DIY cake strips added around 20 minutes to the baking time of this 9 inch by 2.5 inch cake. Third time worked a charm. I got an excellent rise, and an uniform top. I could be anal and level it a teeny bit (which I probably will) but there's no doming to deal with. I'd say I got a 1/4 to a 1/3 more rise on this cake than I usually do.