Proper Cake Baking and Cooling

When baking cakes, it is important to pay as much attention to proper baking and cooling procedures as it is to understand ingredients and mixing.  Always make sure that your oven is preheated completely, and to the correct temperature.  It takes at least twenty minutes for a cake to form enough stability so that it can survive the drastic heat transfer that takes place when you open the oven door. 

When your cakes have been baked properly, take the time to pay attention to cooling.  Unless you are baking angel food cakes, do not let your cakes cool in the pan. 

About five or ten minutes after the pans have been removed from the oven, invert the cakes on to parchment paper dusted with a very small amount of granulated sugar, or sprayed with pan release.  Cakes will continue to dry out if they are left in their pans.