In your lifetime, there will inevitably be bad days, global pandemics (hopefully just this once though), and dry cakes. Sometimes you will be to blame: You overmixed, you mismeasured, you forgot to set a timer, you baked the cake at too high a temperature for too many minutes (if you’re me, all of the above). Other times, you can fault the recipe—not enough fat, too many dry ingredients without enough wet, a ratio that is just plain off.
The good news is that it’s not only possible but easy to salvage a dry cake (maybe you know it’s dry from the way it looks or feels or because you snuck a small bite!) with a little simple syrup. By easy, I mean easy: Poke your loaf cake or layer cake (with a skewer, cake tester, or toothpick), then use a pastry brush to coat it generously with simple syrup, which will soak into the crumb through the channels you just created. That's it: You've successfully completed a “cake soak.”
Fast-forward to minute 13 to learn all about cake soaks.
A cake soak is a quick fix for dry cakes, yes, but it also serves to make good cakes even better, guaranteeing that they’re extra moist and extra tender. In Caroline Wright’s book Cake Magic, she suggests brushing syrup into a hot cake, then letting it cool completely in the pan until it’s no longer wet to the touch, 1–2 hours. “By bathing the cake layers in syrup right after they emerge from the oven,” she writes, “you make double use of the cooling time. While the layers cool, the syrup settles into the cake, changing the crumb and flavor with minimal work on the part of the baker.” She uses ½ cup simple syrup between two 8-inch cake layers.
When it comes to changing the flavor, the simplest simple syrup won’t do much besides making the cake sweeter and moister. But Wright’s coak soak suggestions go way beyond sugar dissolved in water. By changing up the liquid—try cream, milk, coconut milk, apple cider, brewed tea or coffee, lime or grapefruit juice, root beer—and adding spices, extracts, herbs, and liqueurs, you can enhance the taste of a plain cake.
Even if you forgot to add syrup to the cake hot from the oven, if you're making a multi-layered cake you can still apply a cake soak during assembly. For her famous Milk Bar Birthday Cake, Christina Tosi dampens each layer with a mixture of milk and vanilla extract as she stacks them. Claire Saffitz recommends trimming a cake layer first (rather than poking it) so that the syrup can more easily penetrate the interior crumb. In both of these cases, you’ll want to be careful about the amount of soak you use, as it can cause the cakes to oversaturate and disintegrate: Dab the soak over a layer just one time.
With this technique in your pocket, you may never have to suffer through a dry cake again. Unless, of course, you’re served a slice at someone else’s house—in that case, just eat it. (Or ask for some whipped cream.)
Want a slice?
Extremely plush, fine-crumbed, and dare-we-say moist, this is like the best wedding cake—and you mix it entirely by hand.
