What's New - Hints and Tips

Do you have a favourite recipe that you would like to make in a smaller or larger tin?  The formula is really easy - so hopefully the detail below will help you.

If you are using the same shape tin, i.e. a circle, you multiply the diameter of the tin by itself, and do the same with the other tin you would like to use, and then divide the resulting numbers into themselves - lets show you how this looks...

You have a 6 inch cake tin with your favourite recipe and you want to create the same recipe to turn out perfectly in an 8 inch tin.  Here are the calculations:-

6 x 6 = 36.  8 x 8 = 64.   64 divided by 36 = 1.78.

So you just multiply all of your ingredients by 1.78 to get a perfect recipe for your new larger tin.  The same formula works backwards if you want to use a smaller tin:-

6 x 6 = 36. 4 x 4 = 16.  16 divided by 36 = 0.44

You just multiply all of your ingredients by 0.44 to get the new recipe.

Things become a little more complicated with spoon sizes and eggs, so the best way to overcome this is to measure out your normal spoon sizes on a digital scale and get a gram weight for your eggs and liquid measures, then the conversion above works just the same.  For example a teaspoon is around 5ml, so this is the number you would use for the conversion.  Medium eggs are around 47gms, so use this for the conversion.

If you want to use a shaped tin, such as a square, or petal, or hexagon shape, then the formula would need a different method for the volume size of the tin.  Put your usual tin on a set of digital scales, and tar the scales to zero.  If your usual tin is a 6 inch circle x 3 inches tall, fill the tin with water to the height of the tin and note the gram weight volume - lets say for formula purposes it weighs it is 2600 grams/ml.  Now you want to use a petal shaped tin that is 8 inches at its widest point x 3 inches tall.  Again fill the new tin with water on the scales, remembering to tar the scales setting after putting the  tin on.  Lets say the new weight is 4600 grams/ml.  You now simply divide the 4600 by 2600 to get the conversion rate, so in this example it would look like:-

4600 divided by 2600 = 1.76

Just increase your recipe by 1.76 per ingredient.

Point to note however is that if your petal tin happens to be 4 inches tall, just fill the water up to the height of 3 inches as per your original tin, to keep the formula accurate.

Now there is no excuses not to use that tried and trusted recipes in all shapes and sizes. Just remember that you will need to adjust the baking time for both larger and smaller tins - so a smaller tin will need much less baking, with a 4 inch tin probably only needing around 35 - 40 minutes, but a 12 inch tin would probably need closer to  115 minutes.