Cut Cake Without A Knife Using This Old School Technique

You've just baked the perfect cake. Now, you need to slice it perfectly. But using a sharp knife often requires you to slice the cake multiple times, since the average knife isn't quite long enough to cut it all at once. It can lead to pulling out the filling or messing up the frosting. If you need a kitchen hack that will change your life, enter the old-school cake-cutting method you've probably forgotten about (or have never even heard of): using a string.

The technique is simple. Cut a piece of string that's long enough to go through the entire length of the cake, plus some additional string for your hands to grip. Slide it under the cake to where you want to slice it, then with both hands, pull the string ends toward each other to essentially pinch the cake, perfectly slicing it. Go around the cake, repeating this method until you reach your desired number of slices. The string results in an even cut because it's easier to eyeball than when free-handing it with a knife, and no cake gets stuck. Another alternative to the pinching method is to pull the string tightly and gently push it through the cake, but you'll need an extra sturdy string to do so.

To properly cut a cake without creating a mess, you need a string that's strong enough to slice through the layers with ease. For that reason, avoid anything too thin, such as ribbon, or anything with rough edges, such as twine (this will affect how neat the slices look). Your best bet is to use something with clean edges and little give, such as dental floss or fishing line. If using dental floss, make sure that it isn't flavored or scented. If you don't live near a fish and wildlife store, floss is probably a little more accessible than fishing line. Pro tip: it's great for slicing cheese, too and works for other baked goods like brownies as well.

However, fishing line is extra sturdy, so if you think you'll use this method frequently, then it's worth picking some up. Fishing line is easy to pull tightly, so you can use the push-through method rather than the pinching method for this one. One more trick: once you push the line through, slide it across the bottom of the cake to remove it horizontally. This prevents you from accidentally messing up the perfect slice by trying to pull the line back up.