Jennifer Garner Has a Clever Trick to Save an Ugly Cake Within Seconds — It Needs Just One Ingredient

Like painting, cooking is an art that uses nature’s five elements to whip up a delicious piece of flavor. But these elements are notorious for throwing off tantrums from time to time, which is why cooking is never a perfect job. Take, for instance, dishes like pancakes or muffins, which are prepared via a batter. It is not an unfamiliar scene to see this batter end up sticking in the pan or the tray, resulting in a crumbly cake or a fragmented pancake. Many cooking quirks can fix or prevent this messy episode, but lesser known is the one shared a few months ago by American actress Jennifer Garner (@jennifer.garner).

In an Instagram reel, the 53-year-old star shared the recipe of a “whipped cream cake” as part of her “Pretend Cooking Show,” where she regularly posts recipes of muffins, pizzas, icecreams, saucy noodles, toasts, cookies, flavoured breads, smoothies, and more. This recipe, she said, was inspired by the book Cake Bible, authored by Rose Levy Beranbaum (@realbakingwithrose). The video opens with Garner grooving in style on the wooden floor of her kitchen, standing in front of the countertop area. With the book flipped open on the counter, she started collecting ingredients from boxes, jars, and closets in the kitchen.

At first, the 13 Going On 30 actress scooped two-and-a-half cups of cake flour from a jar and sifted it into a steel measuring bowl using a strainer. Flour was followed by two tablespoons of baking powder plus three-fourths of a teaspoon of fine sea salt. She dumped the resulting powder in a green plastic bowl. In a similar bowl of brown color, she cracked three large eggs, collecting their yellow yolks. Next, she added three egg whites plus one tablespoon of vanilla extract and whisked all the ingredients. This was followed by one-and-a-half cups of cold heavy cream plus two tablespoons of superfine sugar. 

The Texas-born actress then tossed everything in a larger bowl and gave it a good mix. This resulted in a viscous blend of pastel yellow color. Garner transferred the viscous batter into a donut-shaped oven tray and levelled it up using a butter knife. She gently shoved the batter-filled tray inside the oven, coating it with baking spray and flour. The oven was preheated to 375℉, and after about 25 to 30 minutes, she pulled out the tray. The batter was now a fluffy donut baked well in a sunflower-yellow color.

Garner dug a wooden toothpick inside the fluffy dessert and flipped the tray upside down to make the cake unlatch and slip down onto the paper. But it seemed the cake refused to leave the tray. After trying many quirks to get the cake out of the tray, the Elektra star flipped the tray upside down on the counter and stuck a knife into the back hole, poking the cake from the back. The poke loosened the cake, and it dropped down on the parchment paper. But it wasn’t any less disappointing. The circular edges of the donut turned out to be crumbly in certain places. A part of it had a torn upper layer that revealed the fluffy yellow bread sitting inside. But Garner had already thought of a cunning strategy to cover up the sticky blunder.

She took a tiny strainer and filled it with powdered sugar. By shaking the strainer on top of the donut, she filled the top layer of the cake with plenty of white sugar, thereby covering up the crumbly mess. There is nothing, after all, that can’t be solved in a messed-up dish as long as it ends up tasting good. “Taste trumps beauty when I’m the baker,” she wrote in the reel caption, and added, “Mistakes = the baker’s piece = lucky me!”

Watch Garner's recipe below!