Cutting In Butter Or Shortening

What does it mean when a recipe says to cut butter into a flour mixture?

It means breaking up the butter or shortening into the flour.

For pastry, you break up the butter/shortening into smaller pieces so that the flour gets coated with some fat and the flour won't absorb too much liquid.
For a struesel topping, you cut in butter to get a crunchy crumbly topping.

There are pastry cutters you can buy to cut in the butter/shortening.
You can also use a fork to just break it up.

What I prefer to do is to work the butter into the flour or sugar/flour mix with my hands.
To do this, just stick your hands into the bowl with the butter and just rub it into the flour.
Make sure you end up with coarse crumbs.

For pastry, leave some of the pieces of butter larger and some smaller.

For a struesel topping, all the butter should be uniform so all the crumbs are about the same size.

How To Neatly Remove Cakes From Pans

Some cakes are just hard to remove neatly from pans.

If you don't leave them in long enough before you turn them out, sometimes the pan is old, sometimes it doesn't seem greased and floured well enough.
And the cake rips and some is left in the pan.

An easy way to avoid that problem to to use parchment paper to line the bottom of your pan.

To do this you need to cut the paper to fit the bottom of the pan.

Now, grease the whole pan. Don't flour though.

Lay the parchment over the bottom of the pan. Grease the parchment paper.

Now, you flour the whole pan.

When it is time to turn the cake out of it's pan, loosen the sides of the cake from the pan.

Take a plate or serving platter the size of your cake or even a little larger and turn it face down over the cake in the pan.

Quickly flip the pan and plate over so the pan is cake down over the plate.

Carefully lift up the cake pan. The cake should be laying on the plate.

Peel off the parchment paper.

To turn the cake right side up, take another plate and put it over the bottom and flip it again.

If you plan to use this method for cheesecakes, wait til the cake has been chilled well so it is firm enough to stay together.