Hi All

Hoping you can all advise me as I am baking my first wedding cake from TCB. The white butter cake with a lemon buttercream and lemon curd filling.

As i figure you just sandwich the 2 cakes together to form the tier, i was thinking of baking three 9 inch cakes to make a deeper middle tier. The recipe in TCB is for 2x6 and 2x9 inch layers. How do I calculate to make more mixture to make an extra 9 inch layer.

Is there a formula that i have not stumbled across??

I am a good cake baker i would say and am pushing myself to do bigger better cakes. I am good at the practical but not theoretical, so wondered if you guys could explain it to me real easy.

My cake tins are also 2 inches deep and I belive from my reading that this also makes a difference??

Thanks in advance

Hi, Herbqueen!

Welcome!

To go from a recipe calling for 1.5” deep pans to one calling for 2” deep pans, you need 1/3 more batter, so multiply everything by 1.33.

For the wedding cake you mention, the 9” layers use 66% of the batter, so an extra 9” layer would half that—33% again—so multiply everything by 1.33.

To bake, then, a 1.5” pan recipe in 2” pans AND add an extra 9” layer, you have 1 (the recipe) x 1.33 (for the pans) x 1.33 (for extra the layer) = 1.76x the original recipe.

Wedding cake experts—feel free to chime in here, for sure!!!!!

Please keep us posted on your cake progress!!!

—ak

The wedding cake on page 484 already is for 2 inch high pans, so no adjustment is needed for that.

I would calculate the adjustment based on the ratio of volumes of the desired to the current:

Since the heights of the pans are all the same, and all of the volumes include the value for pi, we can drop those from the calculation and get

As a verification, you can multiple the 1.35 times the flour of 600 g to get 810 g, which is 210 g more.  If you go back to the formula for the yellow cake at the beginning of the book, you’ll see that the amount of flour needed for 1 layer of 2 inches is 2/3 * 300 = 200g, so everything appears to match.

I agree with Charles.  I think mine was 1.33 for the extra 9” layer, but I tend to play a little fast and loose with the numbers ... !

What’s a measly 2% among friends? 

I was trying to identify why Rose’s correction in the two layer cake is 2/3 for converting to a 2 layer 1.5” to a 1 layer 2”.  I calculate the factor should be .75.  She may be taking into account the overhead of batter clinging to the beaters and the bowl, which would be constant no matter how big the batch size was.

Hey guys, thank you sooo much. So I guess that is the formula if I wanted to decrease or increase ? My math is a little rusty. I have another cookbook that gives recipes for triple layer 9 inch cakes and I only wanted to make 2 layers of that one so I could apply that formula ??
Forgive me if I am being dense

Thanks

herbqueen - 10 June 2012 11:56 AM

I have another cookbook that gives recipes for triple layer 9 inch cakes and I only wanted to make 2 layers of that one so I could apply that formula ??

No, the formula we discussed takes into account that some of the batter is for 6 inch pans.  Your new scenario is much easier:  just take 2/3 of the batter.

@Herbqueen

This formula is a little different because we’re taking into account all this extra batter for the 6” tier. 

If it were a normal recipe (i.e, written for just one, rather than two, tiers), you’d do one of the following:

(A) If it were written for two 9” layers, and you wanted to make three, you’d multiply everything by 1.5 to get that extra layer (because you want to make the whole recipe for 2 layers, and then 1/2 the recipe for 1 layer).

(B)  If it were a recipe for 3 layers and you only wanted to make two, you’d multiply everything by .66 (which equals 2/3) (because you want to make 2 of 3).

If the recipe was written for 1.5” pans and you wanted to bake it in 2” pans, first, multiply the whole recipe by 1.33, and then multiply again by either (A) or (B) above to get your final quantities.

================================================

@CT

I was trying to identify why Rose’s correction in the two layer cake is 2/3 for converting to a 2 layer 1.5” to a 1 layer 2”.  I calculate the factor should be .75. 

I get 2/3—let’s take 6” pans, for example, because they’re so easy to deal with:

3 x 3 x 3.14 x 1.5 (height ) x 2 (pans) = 84.78
3 x 3 x 3.14 x 2 (height) x 1 (pan) = 56.24

56.24/84.78 = .66

Thus, the single 2” pan is 2/3 of two 1.5” pans.

Does that jive with your thoughts, or am I calculating wrong?

—ak

p.s., Those formulas you wrote were beautifully done.  How the heck do you do that —change the font and such?

Anne in NC - 10 June 2012 09:03 PM

Does that jive with your thoughts, or am I calculating wrong?

No, I think you’re right.  I must have left off the “2” for the two pans.  It always helps to write neatly. 

I surrounded my formulas with the “[Code][/Code]” tags; the stuff inside is supposed to be displayed as computer code, which is why the highlighting is weird.  It makes everything a monospaced font so that the formatting is preserved.  No tags are recognized on the inside.

Thank you!!!!

Anne & Charles, thank you, it’s always great to learn something you never knew