Best way to scale up this cake recipe?
January 17, 2011 10:46 AM   Subscribe

I am planning on making this cake, but think I may be serving more than 10-12 people. Would it be easier to make two cakes or double the recipe and make it as a sheet cake?

I have experience with Devil's Food cake, but not a whole lot of experience working with Angel's food cake, which I feel is more delicate and prone to sinking. So bakers, what would be the least headache-inducing way to basically double the recipe: sheet cake or two separate layer cakes? I welcome any tips about baking layer cakes as well.
posted by piratebowling to Food & Drink (9 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: My first reaction is that at 10", that's a HUGE cake, and 1/12 of the cake would be an enormous serving. You could easily get between 16 and 24 reasonably sized servings out of that cake (I often slice 9" triple layer cakes into up to 32 slices at parties if the cake is remotely rich and dense, and no one has ever complained about skimpy servings).

However, you asked about scaling up the recipe. A 10" cake layer is going to be somewhere around 78 square inches. If you double the recipe without adjusting baking times and temperatures, you'll want a pan that has about 155 square inches, so about 10 x 15 inches -- unfortunately, jelly roll pans, which have those dimensions, don't have sides high enough to contain the volume of batter that doubling the recipe would produce. For that reason, I'd recommend making two separate layer cakes. Unless you have two 10" pans, I would mix the batter for each cake separately, to prevent the batter from settling in the time between preparation and baking.
posted by amelioration at 10:57 AM on January 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Unless you have more than 20 people, or are serving cake and no other food, that will be sufficient cake. (Slice very, very thin. It's a lot of rich cake, and, as amelioration says, you can easily slice a multilayer rich cake into 32 slices and find people do not finish even that.)

If you do scale up, do make 2 layer cakes, for all the reasons above.
posted by jeather at 11:03 AM on January 17, 2011


Alternatively, you could make a double batch of batter and bake it in two jelly roll pans, which would also save you the hassle of slicing the layers in half and double the recipe. If you choose this route, keep a very careful eye on the baking process -- it will be finished baking in less than half the time.
posted by amelioration at 11:04 AM on January 17, 2011


I don't think a sheet pan would be deep enough to pull this off, unless you use two pans and cook each layer twice. I think cake pan and a serrated knife is a better option.
posted by Gilbert at 11:06 AM on January 17, 2011


Another suggestion: Make the same amount of cake as the recipe calls for, in the round pans as directed. Cut the cake as directed, and then assemble the cake layers and mouse into two lower cakes. Each would be (from the bottom) devil-mouse-angel. You would need more ganache to cover the two, because you'll have two tops instead of one.
posted by wryly at 11:15 AM on January 17, 2011


Best answer: I wouldn't double the angel food recipe, but rather make it twice separately, especially if you only have the one pan, as amelioration notes.

But even if you don't -- angel food cake relies on the loft of the egg whites, and you want to do only a very small amount of mixing of them, in order to maintain that loft. I'd be very worried that doubling the recipe would require more mixing and throw off the balance of the cake.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:17 AM on January 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: amelioration and jeather, you answered another question that I had and didn't post, which is whether or not I was just being paranoid with how many servings one cake would actually produce. I think just making one and cutting smaller slices may be the best way to ensure I don't go insane from a baking project.
posted by piratebowling at 11:19 AM on January 17, 2011


Amelioration is right, there's no way that cake is going to give only 12 servings. Just look at it. The circumference of a circle is pi times the diameter, right? So its circumference is over 31 inches. If each piece of cake were an inch wide you'd have 31 servings. Generous slices of 1.5 inches would still yield about 21 servings.
posted by fingersandtoes at 11:23 AM on January 17, 2011


Nth-ing comments that you will have more than enough cake for over 12 people. Depending on the event (full dinner first), everyone may not eat dessert anyway. (Some may be in the throes of New Year's weight-loss resolutions as well.) In fact, you may have some left over that you could send to SF! Looks like a great recipe, I saved it and wish I had some now.
posted by sfkiddo at 1:35 PM on January 17, 2011


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