House rules
The rules we hold ourselves to
Somebody opens a recipe with 200 g of butter already softening on the counter. If a weight is wrong they lose the ingredients, the afternoon, and whatever they were baking it for. These are the rules that stop that happening. Updated 19 September 2026.
1. Every quantity comes from somewhere
No recipe on this site is written from memory. Before a single gram is published, at least two independently developed recipes for the same cake in the same tin size are found, normalised to one 20 cm tin, and compared. When two sources that were developed separately land within about ten per cent of each other on flour and sugar, the shape underneath them is real and worth building on. When they disagree, a third is found rather than averaging two numbers that are arguing.
Those sources are printed on the recipe, under Where these quantities come from, with the weights we read and every place we departed from them. You can go and check. That is the entire point of printing them.
2. The words are ours, the numbers are not owned by anyone
A list of ingredients and quantities is not something anybody can own, and we take those freely. The writing is a different matter, so no method text, note or photograph is ever copied from a source. If a sentence is on this site, somebody here wrote it.
3. Scaling up is where recipes break, so it is checked by code
Most published cakes are a thin layer meant to be stacked with another, around 120 to 135 g of flour. This site serves one cake cut into wedges, so almost every recipe is scaled up, and that is exactly where a recipe goes wrong. A batter scaled up by half needs more than half again the time, because heat has further to travel and the top browns long before the middle sets.
So the rules that can be checked are not a checklist any more. They are a program that runs before anything is published, and it refuses:
- batter over 1,350 g, which is what a 20 cm springform actually holds
- anything over 1,000 g given less than 45 minutes in the oven, because it would come out raw
- more than 1.5 tsp of baking powder per 150 g of flour, which tastes of the tin it came from
- bicarbonate of soda with no acid anywhere to react with, and acid with no raising agent to use it
- sugar, fat and liquid outside the ratios to flour that hold a cake together
- an oven temperature whose fan and Fahrenheit conversions do not agree with each other
- an ingredient in the list that the method never uses, or a weight in the method that no ingredient has
That last one matters more than it sounds. It is the check that stops a recipe saying 250 g in step three when the list says 195 g, which is the single most common error in published baking.
4. Long enough to tell when it is going wrong
Every step says what the thing should look, feel or smell like, not only what to do to it. "Cream the butter and sugar" is useless on its own. Four to five minutes, until it is pale and noticeably lighter in volume and holds a soft peak on the beater, is a sentence you can check yourself against.
That is why these recipes are long. It is not padding for a search engine. It is the difference between following instructions and knowing what you are looking at.
5. No invented anything
No grandmother who did not exist, no village in Austria the cake did not come from, no health claim, and no nutrition figure we did not calculate. If we do not know something, the recipe says so.
6. The pictures are of the actual steps
The step photographs are made in a single locked kitchen set so that five pictures read as one afternoon rather than five different cakes. Each one is checked against what has physically happened by that point in the method. A finished cake never appears in a mixing shot, because at that moment in the method nothing has been baked yet.
7. A recipe is not finished because it built
Passing the checks means a recipe is internally consistent. It does not mean it is a good cake. Every recipe is read start to finish by a person before it goes up, and when one is replaced, the replacement is written and checked before the old one comes down.
Rules for your kitchen
These are the ones we cannot check for you.
Read the packet, not the recipe, for allergens
Every recipe flags nuts, dairy, egg, gluten and alcohol plainly in its notes. That flag is about the recipe, not about your particular brands. Chocolate is made on lines that also handle nuts, "vanilla essence" is sometimes alcohol, and only the packet in your hand knows. We cannot know your allergies and a recipe page is not a substitute for checking.
Ovens lie, and yours lies in its own particular way
Every temperature here is given three ways: conventional, fan, and Fahrenheit. They are still a starting point. An oven thermometer costs very little and will tell you more about your baking than any recipe can. Where a recipe gives a window, start checking at the early end.
Bake it through
Raw flour and raw egg both carry a real risk, so cakes go back in rather than getting eaten underdone. Anything on this site containing raw or barely cooked egg, such as a fresh curd or an uncooked buttercream, says so at the top of its notes. If you are pregnant, very young, elderly or immunocompromised, use pasteurised egg or skip those.
Hot sugar is the dangerous part
Caramel runs at about 170C and sticks to skin. Cream going into hot sugar erupts, so warm it first, stand back, and use a pan deep enough to take the bubble. Children are better placed on the whisking than on the caramel.
The scale is not optional
Everything here is in grams because cups are not a measurement of anything. A cup of flour spooned in weighs about 120 g and a cup scooped and packed can weigh 150 g, which is a quarter more flour than the recipe wants, and a quarter more flour is a dry cake. Digital scales cost less than the ingredients they save.
Rules about using what is here
Bake them, halve them, double them, sell what you bake. The full position is on the terms page, and the short version is that the numbers are yours to use and the writing and pictures are not yours to republish.
Rules about your data
We store an email address if you give us one, and nothing else. Saved recipes and ticked ingredients stay in your own browser and never reach us. The cookie notice remembers your answer in your browser's local storage, under creamyslice:consent, so that it stops asking. That is the only thing this site stores on your device, and declining is a real decline. The detail is on the privacy page.
If something is wrong
If a weight looks wrong to you, it might be, and we would rather know. Emailhello@creamyslice.com with the recipe and the step, and it gets checked against the sources the same day.
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