In the long and frankly unrelenting history of humanity as we know it, a few things are certain. We all die, we can’t escape the taxman, and at some point there is a tax season. great british bake offa contestant in a hurry shakes a baking sheet over the cake to cool it faster. No matter the season, no matter the skill level of the baker, no matter the style of the cake, there will inevitably be a mad scramble to cool the cake with the speed of a baking sheet and the power of elbow grease. .
At home, there is little need to reduce the temperature of a cake within 20 minutes, away from the stress of Noel Fielding’s time. But on bake offwhere time is just as precious. A handshake from someone you hatebakers would have you believe that waving a cookie sheet over a dessert is some powerful, mysterious magic. Shaking the baking sheet trick has become a classic. bake off Legend has it that in the first episode of Season 10 (objectively one of the best episodes of the entire season), Michael saw Dan Chambers flapping a sheet over a fruitcake. Chakrabarti reacted with awe: He’s doing it! Does it work?
“No,” Chambers says desperately. Still, he keeps talking.
like a hopelessly devoted person bake offcertain things about the show bother me — Why on earth don’t they change their clothes between the first and second day? Why is Paul Paul? When will Gato’s reign in the Black Forest end? But at some point, I just couldn’t let go of the fact that there were things shaking sheet pans everywhere. We have to assume it works because everyone is doing it, but does everyone do it because they saw others doing it in previous seasons?
The only way to find out was to conduct a very unscientific test.
First, the controls. it wouldn’t be an episode bake off I didn’t have Genoise sponge and Italian meringue buttercream, so I made both as normal at first. Once the sponge was fully baked, I removed it from the oven, let it cool in the mold for 6 or 7 minutes, then removed it from the springform onto a cooling rack and inserted a ThermoWorks probe thermometer with a temperature alarm directly into the sponge. center. I patiently watched the temperature get colder, hoping to settle between 70 and 75 degrees within an hour. I kept looking. And I held out hope. And I kept looking.
I was shocked to learn that without any intervention, the Genoise sponge took nearly two full hours to cool. just imagine bake off Contestants waited a long time for their cakes to cool in a stuffy tent in the middle of a humid British summer before plating them with different types of buttercream, tuile, meringue kisses and tempered chocolate. That was not possible given time constraints. But could the cookie sheet trick save you another 20 minutes, or even 10? I was skeptical.
In the experiment, identical Genoise sponges were baked at exactly the same oven temperature. I pulled a short stool up to the oven window to watch the progress before it overheated and got boring and I decided this was the next step. bake off Contestants are motivated out of crazy, irrational despair. (No offense, but watching them bake is already a waste of precious time.) When the timer went off, I stood the pancakes upright in the tin, peeled off the springy collar, and placed them in the cooler. I placed it on top. I placed it on a rack, stuck a thermometer probe into the center, and immediately started fanning it on a baking sheet like a savage.
Then something amazing happened. Within seconds, the temperature on the thermometer began to drop rapidly while I was furiously waving the baking sheet from a foot away. The cake temperature started at 205 degrees, and while I was holding my breath and waving, thanks to my dedication, the temperature quickly dropped to an amazing 139 degrees. The temperature will drop by 66 degrees in 10 minutes. That was nothing short of a miracle compared to how the first cake cooled to 132 degrees for two excruciating hours.
Sweaty and exhausted, I decided enough was enough. bake off‘s contestants had time to do anyway, so they switched to another common trick employed by baking show contestants. I slipped the cake into the freezer and hung the thermometer probe outside the door (still sucked into the center). After 30 minutes, my cake reached exactly the same temperature as the control cake. The second Genoise sponge was chilled in a third of the time it took the first cake and was ready to be iced with what I admitted was a pretty awful Italian buttercream. all of them bake off The contestant shaking the baking sheet over the cake was not only extraordinarily hopeful, but also a genius.
In this season’s latest episode, “Bread Week,” self-taught Slovenian baker Nelly waves a small round paddle at a wreath she wove during a skill challenge and (spoiler alert) takes first place. The judges particularly praised the “beautiful texture” of her bread. We’d like to speculate that Nelly’s little cooldown wave definitely gave her an edge.
