Let them eat cake…scraps

August 28, 2019 by
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If you bake a lot of cakes (or even just a few now and then), you might have encountered this dilemma – the cakes are domed and won’t stack, so you trim the tops off to level them. This results in small scraps of lovely cake that you really can’t do anything with – right? Wrong, says Stella Parks. She tells us that we should be using them in ice cream.

Gelato
Photo of Sweet cream chocolate chip gelato (Stracciatella gelato) from Serious Eats by Stella Parks

My go-to use for cake trimmings is to make rum balls , because what’s better than cake? Cake with a lot of booze! But it is always good to have another option, I suppose, and ice cream swirled with bits of cake does have a certain appeal.

Parks says that you don’t need to save up a large collection of cake scraps to use in a batch of ice cream, saying that one leveled-off dome from a cake layer should be enough to do the trick. If you have extra cake trimmings (and don’t just idly eat it while cleaning up the kitchen), place it in a freezer bag and save it for another use.

Don’t be tempted to stick the cake scraps into the ice cream machine at the outset, warns Parks. They will break down into indistinguishable specks, and you won’t get the textural contrast you want. Instead, fold the pieces into freshly-churned ice cream before it is placed in the freezer to harden. Whether you want big chunks o’cake or smaller, more delicate pieces is up to you – there is no science to this method, only art.

Category: Antipasto

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5 Comments

  • Shelmar  on  August 29, 2019

    Do you have a recipe for turning the scraps to rum balls?

    • Darcie  on  August 30, 2019

      I use the Rum balls recipe from Food Network by Gale Gand

  • MarciK  on  August 30, 2019

    I watched a YouTube video that showed how to make cakes that don’t dome. You wet a long piece of paper towel, fold it about the height of your cake pan, wrap it in aluminium foil, and wrap the file around the edge of the pan. I tried this last time I made a cake, and it really worked. However, the sides didn’t have that brown crust, so you will want to frost it. Then frosting it, it could crumble more. So there’s a trade off.

  • Jane  on  August 30, 2019

    MarciK – there is also a product called magic cake strips that does the same thing. The idea is that insulating the outer edge of the cake tin means the outer edge doesn’t cook/set faster than the inside, which is what causes the center to dome.

  • trudys_person  on  August 31, 2019

    Cake scraps are the baker’s treat!

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