The Cheap Kitchen Tool You Need To Make Bakery-Worthy Cakes At Home

Wondering why your celebration cake recipe never looks like the picture? If it has domed too quickly, split in the center, or started to burn before the end of the cooking time, you might have a problem with your oven. The cheap kitchen tool you need to eliminate this issue and make sure your cakes are always bakery-worthy is an oven thermometer.

This small tools sits or hangs inside your oven and has a dial on the front that indicates the surrounding temperature. All you need to do is place it inside, set the oven temp, and wait to see how it reads through the closed door. Periodically checking your oven's temperature and making sure it correlates with the set point is essential because some ovens can be off by as much as 50 degrees. This can, in turn, have a negative effect on your bakes and mean that your recipes never quite pass muster, leaving you feeling perplexed when you've otherwise followed the recipe precisely. Delicate cakes in particular can burn quickly when the temperature inside the cavity is higher than the dial, resulting in a burnt exterior and underdone center. Conversely, if your oven temperature is too low, loaf cakes, muffins, and whoopie pies can fail to rise to their full capacity, which is a telltale sign your oven needs to be recalibrated.

Some oven thermometers have large dials to make it easier to see their current temperature through the glass front of an oven door. Others have two parts: A probe that's placed inside the oven, which is connected to a magnetic dial that clings to the exterior of the oven door. These varieties take many readings of the temperature and provide an average. Why is this important? Because most ovens work via a fluctuating system — the heating elements switch on and off to maintain the correct temperature rather than staying fixed throughout, so taking an average temp provides a more accurate reading. However, this type of oven thermometer is more expensive. That said, if you're a prolific baker, investing in a quality oven thermometer will guarantee that your madeleines, moon cakes, and banana bread are always on point.

You can recalibrate an electric oven using the digital control dials on the front. However, if you have an analog dial, you'll need to open it and turn the screws inside (clockwise if your oven is too hot and counterclockwise if it's too cold). Consulting your oven manual to make sure you're doing it correctly is best practice. Once you've recalibrated your oven, use your oven thermometer to check the temp in the cavity again and see if it correlates to the set point.