Welcome to the Cake Decorators Q&A

Hi All,

I was hoping someone might be able to help me before I go completely mad and throw this tin in the bin!!! I bought this thinking it would be a great space saver but I’m having real trouble with my usual vanilla cake recipe in it (Juliet Sears Very Vanilla sponge recipe). I normally use this as a top tier in a 6″ round (which is a heavy duty invicta tin) and also for vanilla cupcakes and it always works perfectly. If I scale it up to my 8″ round tin (silverwood) or to a square cake (again my silverwood multi size pan) it fails miserably no matter what I do!

I’ve successfully used my silverwood tins for Paul’s chocolate cake and also for fruit cakes with no issues but this vanilla cake just won’t work and I’m unsure if it’s the recipe or the tins.

I adjusted Juliet’s 6″ recipe quantities using cakeometer as the first time I used her stated scaled up quantities there was way too much mixture for the tin. So far I’ve had the cake sink totally in the middle before the end of cooking, the cake burnt at the bottom and sides and today it has just completely sunk again and it’s as if the fat separated from the mixture and ran all over the oven floor. I’ve been double lining my tin (apart from the burnt outside/bottom one where I single lined, turned the oven down etc. etc. and nothing seems to work scaling the recipe up with the silverwood tins. My oven temp is correct – had the thermometer in every part of the oven and it’s consistent.

I’ve given up today and ordered an invicta 8″ square tin for what I need…….

I suppose my question is, is it the silverwood tins causing the problem with this particular recipe or is it the recipe itself? Has anyone else ever experienced anything similar?

Yvonne x

Hello Yvonne90

I’m not familiar with the recipe you are using so can’t comment on what may be going wrong. I use the Silverwood multipan for sponge and fruit cakes and so far, touch wood, I’ve had no problems. To see recipe quantities for these pans take a look on the Alan Silverwood site here:
http://www.alansilverwood.co.uk/id33.html
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on recipe quantites. The link will take you to recommended egg quantites for the different size cakes which the multisize pan makes. From their chart you may be able to see how your recipe differs.

Hope this helps.

Thanks MIWL x

You’re welcome Yvonne. I looked online for Juliet Sear’s recipe and found nothing. Presumable it’s one which we have to buy/ buy her book or sign up to her site? I hope you’ve sorted it out, don’t bin the tin, too expensive! My hubby and I both use them, he for bread and me for some of my cakes.x

Well it was definitely the tin not the recipe! Invicta tin arrived this morning and it’s baked perfectly this afternoon! It’s obviously a recipe that needs a heavy duty tin rather than the lighter anodised tins so will have to remember this. The recipe is taken from her book MIWL, it’s actually the only recipe I use out of there, I’ve never found another recipe for vanilla cake to match up to it, all the ones I’ve tried have great flavour but are always either too dense a sponge or too light and fluffy to cope with sugarpaste but this one is perfect, still light and fluffy and moist but not too dense yet dense enough for perfect carving and to cope with sugarpaste if that makes sense?!

I’ll keep the silverwood tin, like you say far too expensive to throw away (although that was what I felt like doing with it the other day!) it’s very handy for small fruit cakes and I’ve never had any issues with various sizes of Paul’s chocolate cake so it’s obviously better for heavier recipes I think.

Sounds like a recipe many of us may want to try! Do you know if it’s available anywhere on line?

Hi Yvonne

Thank you so much for your feed back on both the Silverwood cake tin and the recipe. Indeed your results will be most helpful should anyone else encounter a similar problem. The recipe doesn’t appear to be in the public domain so I can’t try it out in my Silverwood tin. I expect these tins bake too quickly for this particular recipe so you have a rapid rise and expansion then a pop! I guess some recipes are designed for a heavier cake tin. Certainly recipes do behave differently in different types of bakeware as discussed in my blog here:
http://www.cakeflix.com/blog/baking-problems-solutions
If you do get around to reading it, your comment and thoughts would be much appreciated in the comments section of that blog.
Glad you’ve resolved your recipe problem. x