My Favorite Things - Mixing It Up

I love to bake.  Every summer we would visit my grandparents and my grandma was always baking (at least in my little kid mind).  My mom says this is where I learned to bake... and the love affair began.  Summers and weekends spent begging mom to let me bake cookies or muffins or just about anything that had plenty of sugar in it.  I loved baking and I grew up under the impression the only way to make cookies was with a Kitchen Aid Mixer.  This is how mom and grandma did it... it must be a requirement!

In my mind, anyone who owned a Kitchen Aid Mixer had arrived... at adulthood!  Sounds ridiculous now but afterall, this is what moms and grandmas have... so you're not an adult without one, right?  Awww the logic of a child! 

Since I grew up with a love affair with the Kitchen Aid Mixer, it never occurred to me that there might be a defiency with it.  Gasp!  Say it ain't so!  Yes, unfortunately it is so.  See the mixer head unfortunately doesn't get along the edge of the bowl.  The result... butter, flour and other aspects of batter/dough stick to the side.  This is where a spatula becomes a necessity. 

Fellow bakers REJOICE!  The deficiency that has recently been corrected.

This is the Self Scraping Mixer!  Yay!  Works like a champ and it is now one of My Favorite Things!

My Favorite Things - Magi Cake Strips

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

These are a few of my favorite things

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels

Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles

Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings

These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes

Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes

Silver white winters that melt into springs

These are a few of my favorite things

This is the start of a new series... My Favorite Things!  Lately I've found so many things that I'm smitten by.  I wonder if they're really just well kept secrets or if I've just been clueless.  So I've decided that I'm going to start blogging about these things.  
 
Today we're talking about Magi-Cake Strips!

Everyone who has ever baked a cake has experienced a high rise center... you know... that big ole hump in the middle of your cake.  So you get a knife and try to "level" the cake so that you can stack the layers without requiring an inch of icing on the edges.  The travesty is that the part that is excised is the yummy part!  It's moist and fluffy... unlike the edges of the cake.  So what's a baker to do?!?

My mom had Magi-Cake Strips when I was growing up... and I never had a "high rise center" cake (little did I know that's why I didn't).  When I left for college I had no idea why my cakes looked so... odd.  For whatever reason, recently I started researching how to bake a level cake and ended up buying some strips.  The idea is that the strips keep the edge of the pan cooler longer... so that the edges cake bake evenly with the rest of the cake and don't over bake (and collapse back down).  They work!  And this is why they are now one of my favorite things...