I know there are a few out there who do make fruit cakes for wedding cakes and I need your expert advice. I have this great recipe for a 23cm (9") square, or 25cm (10") round fruit cake. I want to make different size cakes and would like to know how to adjust the quantities. I know there is lots of advice regarding batter sizes for other cakes but would this apply to fruit cakes. Thanks in advance.
One way to do it is to use cups of water.
Fill your normal tin with cups of water counting as you go. When you get to the level you normally fill your tin to stop. This tells you how much mix your cake makes so for example if your tin takes 10 cups of water your mix is equal to 10 cups.
Next take the tin you want to use and do the same thing with the water. now if this takes 15 cups you need 1 1/2 times your normal mix. If it takes 20 cups you need double your normal mix.
Hope you can understand my explaination and it helps
Thanks Miss Baritone. I have a recipe for an 8" fruit cake so I divided every ingredient by 8 to get the inch measurement and then multiplied it by the size of cake. Does that sound as though it would work? The only way is to try I suppose.
That won't work because the volume of the pan goes up much faster than the diameter. Using your method you would come up with twice as much batter for a 16" pan, where as a 16" pan actually holds four times as much batter as an 8" pan.
To figure out the diffence between pans, you can just use the formula for area (rather than volume if the depth of the pan is not changing).
area of a circle = pi * r^2
8" round pan - area = 3.14 *16=50 sq inches
16" round pan - area = 3.14 *64= 200 sq inches
A 9" square pan has an area of 81 sq inches (9x9)
a 10" round pan has an area of 78.5 sq inches (3.14*25) , so you can see they hold just about the same amount of batter.
So if you want to make a 8" round cake the area of the pan is 50 sq inches so you would need about 3/4 of your recipe. If you want to make a 12" round cake the area of the pan is 113 sq inches and you would need (113/79) and you would need to 143% of your recipe.
Unless you are comfortable with the math you might want to use some of the tables out there that tell you how much batter each size pan uses. I don't think it should matter if it is a fruit cake, one way to tell is to measure how much batter your recipe makes and compare to the the amount for a 10" round pan in the table.
Hope this was helpful rather than confusing.
Thanks tattummm. That is very helpful. I sort of did a calculation a while back and it went like this.
Square Cake
8" cake = 64sq in
6" cake = 36sq in Add those two together and you get 100sq in = 10" cake.
Would you say that would be right?
Will study your info and try and get it right.
Thanks again.
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