I rarely allow any cake to build in most of my pipes. The exception would be an olivewood, strawberry wood, or a thin walled briar I had dedicated to flake tobacco.
I have found that my pipes will season over time, similar to a cast iron skillet or blackpowder muzzleloader barrel, giving them more protection than they had when being broken in during the first few bowls.
Another aspect that makes it very easy for me to keep minimal cake, is that I am usually focused on keeping my pipe barely lit for maximum flavor. As soon as I feel an uneven hotspot burning on one side of the bowl, or feel the heat transfer to the bottom center of the pipe, I will set it aside and allow it to cool for about 10 minutes.
When I first started pipe smoking, I failed to dry my tobacco to a low enough percentage, making it hard to keep it lit, encouraging me to puff furiously. One day I was trying to keep a Boswell poker going all the way to the bottom of the bowl, when a loud pop echoed through the room, and the cherry inside the pipe came rocketing out of the bowl, like a bottle rocket. This resulted in a spider webbed bowl bottom, which I ended up pipe mudding with some cigar ash. Luckily, the damage was not visible externally on that pipe, due to the fact that it was rather thick walled and on the heavy side.
Once I got the hang of drying my tobacco properly, and smoking my pipes as cool as possible, it became easy to break in and smoke a pipe with minimal damage.
It's actually a satisfying experience to smoke a pipe for hundreds of bowls with minimal damage, allowing to to be restored to almost like new condition at some point down the road.
