A Balancing Act

Yes, I should have wiped the fingerprints before I took the picture. But it would only get dirty again very quickly. Anyway...

Ever since we moved, I haven't been able to make good cakes. OK, they weren't great before we moved. But here, every time I baked a cake, they ended up lopsided. I didn't notice right away. In fact, it took me almost 2 years to identify this problem. In my defense, I don't bake cakes often and 3 of the kids had birthdays in the first 6 weeks of our arrival. My mind was elsewhere.

So about Andy's birthday, I pull out another cake that is shallow on one side and thick on the other. My pans are old and a bit warped. I figure that my problem will be solved if I replace the pans. But I procrastinate.

About a month later, Ellen bakes a cake with the same skewed results. Only this time, I look at the oven. It always looked OK but I notice that the front is actually lower than the back, assuming that the counters are level - which is a big assumption. We got out a level and proved that the cook top was level enough. Maybe not perfect, but the bubble was within the lines. Hmm. So, we put the level on the rack in the oven. Problem. It's WAY off. And the racks are in correctly.

When I lift the over, the feet don't adjust. They are probably supposed to, but I can't made them turn and neither can Andy. So we shimmed them with cardboard. We're Polish. And voila! Drew had a cake of uniform thickness.