Some cake recipes will instruct you to simply grease your cake pans with butter, oil, or cooking spray before you add your batter; others will instruct you to dust that grease with a little bit of flour or sugar to keep your cake from sticking to the pan. Both those methods can be effective, but neither are foolproof. If you want a guarantee that your cake won’t stick to the pan, you’ll have to line it with parchment paper.
Parchment paper is heat-, grease-, and water-resistant, and most importantly, it turns any pan into a nonstick pan. But when you’re working with a round pan, and you want to line both the bottom and the sides, how do you maneuver the parchment to fit the cake round? Simply crushing the paper into the circular shape will cause unsightly wrinkles and folds in your cake that can be difficult to separate from the paper after baking.
To produce flawless baked goods, you’ll need a roll of parchment, a sharp pair of scissors, a little bit of grease, and the following instructions. (Note that this is a tutorial for round baking pans. To learn how to line a circular pan with parchment, click here.)
