The Best Way to Cut a Clean Piece of Cake

“Cutting the cake” is an honor. Whether you’re getting married, retiring, or celebrating a birthday, the task usually falls to a special person on their special day. I’m not the type to nitpick about the aesthetics of a piece of cake, especially one that’s given to me for free, but when cutting the cake, I want to do the best job I can.

Cakes, as you well know, are often made up of multiple layers with icing in between. When you press down on the cake with your knife, these layers of frosting adhere to the knife, brushing the cake with frosting and dragging crumbs through it as you slice. It’s not the end of the world, but it might be a little dirtier than you’d like. If so, consider cutting the cake in a different direction.

According to baker and cook Dan Langan , holding the knife vertically and cutting from outside to inside eliminates this problem, resulting in a “cleaner slice”.

I didn’t have a layer cake to test it out, but I did have an old piece of carrot cake that I forgot about in the back of the fridge. I cut it several times using both methods and found that Dan’s method did indeed reduce the amount of glaze left on the knife.

This is the knife after cutting the cake (the knife is held horizontally):

And this is the knife after cutting from outside to inside (knife held vertically), as described in Dan’s Instagram video:

I wish I could show you a photo of the cake, but it already looked pretty ruined since I’ve been assembling it for a week. (Well, nonetheless.)

But as you can see in the two photos, cutting the cake as Dan described resulted in much less mess, which means cleaner slices. At the very least, using this little trick can make you the hero of an office or birthday party. Just don’t try it at someone else’s wedding. Cutting a wedding cake is frowned upon unless you are the bride and groom, no matter how clean your slices are.