How To 'Glue' Your Cake Back Together With Frosting If It Falls Apart
There's nothing worse than when you try to remove a cake from its baking pan and after all that hard work, it sadly falls apart. Instead of a beautiful whole cake, you're left with broken crumbles and holes in your should-be masterpiece. Although there are delicious uses for leftover cake that you can try so the pieces don't go to waste (cake pops, anyone?), there's an easy hack to 'glue' the pieces back together — all you need is frosting!
Cake frosting works well (just don't make any of these frosting mistakes!) to 'glue' broken chunks of cake together because it's sticky – think about how well it works to hold cake layers together — so it can certainly help to make your cake whole again. Simply spread your choice of frosting around any cracks or crevices in the cake so that the sponge holds. As an added bonus, all that extra frosting is sure to hide those pesky cracks from view. By doing this, no one will know your cake wasn't picture-perfect all along.
The best frosting to glue your cake back together
The frosting you use to patch up a broken cake should be thick so that the pieces of sponge will stick together nicely and hold firm. Buttercream frosting is thick enough to achieve this, so try whipping up a traditional American buttercream frosting. If your recipe doesn't call for buttercream, you can use mascarpone frosting instead because it also has a nice, thick consistency.
If you're dealing with some small cracks in your cake that you only want to cover up, as opposed to big, broken chunks, you don't have to use thick frosting to achieve hiding the damage — a delicious chocolate ganache will be sufficient. Since it contains both chocolate and ingredients like heavy cream, ganache has a soft texture, so it won't harden or stiffen enough to fill up larger cracks in a cake, but it will do a great job masking those cracks.
How to prevent your cake from falling apart
While these hacks are certainly handy for fixing broken cakes, it's best to avoid them altogether. To prevent your cakes from falling apart, always prep your baking pan! Although there are many ways to do this, King Arthur Baking tested different cake pan preparation methods and found that placing parchment paper on the bottom of the pan and spraying non-stick pan spray along the sides of the pan were the most effective ways to prevent the cake batter from sticking to it.
Once your cake is removed from the oven, you likely want to let it cool, but you don't want to leave it to cool inside its pan for too long as this can backfire, causing it to stick. Always check the recipe instructions as it will specify cooling times for the type of cake you're baking — some cakes need to be removed from their baking pans as soon as they're taken out of the oven, while others need time to cool. But, if all else fails and your cake breaks into pieces, now you know patching it up is a piece of cake.