I think this has probably been the most commonly asked question in the last couple of months…
” I have just bought a football shirt / sphere / teddy bear shaped cake tin. Please can you tell me how much ingredients I need to use?”
I use a simple formula which you can read more about in the post “How to adapt recipes for different size cake tins” but in a nutshell you measure the amount of water the cake tin will hold in ml and divide or multiply that amount by the base cake ingredient. My base cake is a 6″.
Help! I’m not big on maths?
Then it’s a good job I’ve worked it out for you. Having been asked such an array of sizes over the years I decided that it would be best to just work out a multitude of sizes and put them in a chart for reference. Now, I have calculated these quantities but I haven’t baked them so the baking times are guestimates. If you bake one of these size cakes please let me know if the timing are out so I can amend the chart – thanks you guys.
How to measure the volume of a cake tin
The easy peasy steps
- If your tin has a loose bottom place a plastic bag in it. I use the white bathroom bin bags as they’re big enough and don’t have holes in the bottom like a supermarket carrier bag does.
- Fill your tin with water measuring as you go. I count out loud so I don’t loose count. It’s a trick I use when measuring ingredients too. Once I get to 6 I’m bound to be interrupted!
- Keep adding water till the cake tin is full up to around 1-2cm from the top.
- Write down how many ml your cake tin holds
- Check the amount against the volumes in the chart below.
