How to Decorate a Cake- How to Prepare Your Cake Pan for Baking

Learn the basic techniques of cake decorating with this instructional video guide - How to Prepare Your Cake Pan for Baking

Hi! I am Sandy Sheppard, master cake decorator, and I am here to show you today how to prepare your pan for baking your cakes. Now, there are few different methods of doing this and I would like to share a couple of those with you and then I would like to show you my way, it's my video after all, right? One method is to use Crisco and spread it on your pans, and dump in flour. Another, which is slightly easier, is to use oil. This is just regular vegetable oil. I actually use canola because it's lower in saturated fats, and everyone is concerned about that these days. But, you paint on your pan with the vegetable oil, this is just a normal pastry brush, which you can buy in your grocery stores or department stores. Now, I am not going to do it all the way, but then you are going to take some flour. This is just general all purpose flour, put some of it in your pan and start taping your pans until it goes all the way around, and with my cakes, I need it up on the sides as well. If you're using a chiffon cake or an angle food cake, you would leave this step out entirely, you do not want to grease or flour your pans and then you dump out the excess. Now, if you happened to have a pan there, ready to catch, it's okay, but it's messier and of course I haven't got spots in my pans, so it's a little bit trickier of the technique. I would like to show you my method of doing it. This is not Crisco; this is my special recipe of pan grease. It's interesting little look, it's very simple. It's one cup of all purpose flour, one cup of Crisco shortening and one-half of the cup of vegetable oil and I use my pastry brush just like I did with that, and spread it on. Go up the sides of the pan, and make sure you don't have any shiny spots. If there is a spot that's a little shiny that means you have messed it. So go back and catch that, and then you are ready for baking and I will show you how to fill the pan properly on our next video.