Cutting a cake seems easy until you’re the one who has to do it. I don’t know about you, but every time I am told “you do it!” and I walk toward the cake with the knife, my hands are clammy. You see, cutting a cake sounds easy, but slicing into a big round cake isn’t quite as easy as it should be. You want to cut neat slices, not slivers that belong to toddlers or wedges that are so giant it makes people stop and stare. Everyone is silently judging you too if the slices are not even.
Anyway, I immediately felt relieved when I saw this nifty little trick on the Rachael Ray Show a while back. It’s called the “bowl method” and I swear, once you see how to do it, you will want to do nothing else. It is just one of those “oh duh, why didn’t I think of that?” type hacks.
So you take a small- or medium-sized bowl, depending on how large your cake is. You lightly, and I do mean lightly, place the bowl in the center of the cake. No need to press down, you are not making a crater, you just want to make a circle outline on the frosting. When you lift up the bowl, boom, you essentially drew a perfect guide on the top of your cake.
Now, for the best part, you just cut along that circle. Essentially, you have created a smaller “cake within a cake.” When you’re ready, start cutting the outer ring into wedges. Those wedges are a good size for most people, never too small and never too big. Once you’ve cut the outer part of the cake, you’ve now created a smaller cake in the middle. You can still cut it in the same fashion, and it’s less intimidating because, well, it’s smaller.
The ingeniousness is beautiful in its simplicity. This method of cutting cake is obviously something bakers and catering people use all the time. I should have thought of this sooner. Their job is to produce casual cuts of cake quickly. So no one will complain that their slice is too thin or too large, while wanting the cake to still look reasonable. This method accomplishes all of that.
Why the Bowl Method Works
What I like about the bowl method is it takes all the stress off the cake cutter. It takes the panic off being an artist and careful that you are about to ruin a perfect piece of edible art. The bowl does half the work for you. And because there are now uniform cuts, there will be no awkward shuffles at the table when someone gets a sliver and another gets a wedge the size of a 3-inch doorstop!
The first time I used this was hysterical. I actually laughed out loud because it worked that well. I have been The Cake Cutter at enough birthday parties to know how this usually ends. Cake crumbs all over the floor, icing sliding off the sides of the cake, and people saying, “eh, can you make mine a little smaller?”. The bowl method will make you look like you actually know what you are doing, even if you don’t!
Stress-Free Cake Cutting
So, the next time your server anxiety has kicked into overdrive, and you are standing over a large round cake, with 12 pairs of hungry eyes on you, just think bowl, circle, cut the outer circle, then cut the middle. That is it! Super simple and quick. No sweaty palms.
And yes, there is a video of some sort that demonstrates this, in case you’re wondering. They say a picture is worth 1000 words but I can guarantee you will not forget it once you visualize it. It is one of those mental sticky notes right next to “don’t lick the knife.”
