Baking – How to keep the oven evenly heated

In a conventional oven, the majority of the heat is at the top.

You don't mention lowering the oven rack to compensate for the change in height. I'm fairly certain that would solve your problem.

Center rack is normally recommended - if you used a higher rack then that's definitely the reason it burned. But even if you used the center rack, you might need to lower it for a particularly tall cake. You might also need to extend the cooking time slightly to compensate for the lower effective temperature.

Note that this doesn't apply to convection ovens, which have a relatively constant temperature throughout.

Some convection ovens have the ability to turn off the fan -- if yours has one, that would be recommended.

One of the big issues is that the cooking time changes based on the surface area of the item being cooked -- so if you have a thin cake, such as a jelly roll (baked thin, then rolled up), your cooking time will be dramatically reduced ... but it doesn't help with large cakes -- you'll just end up with the top browing faster than the middle sets.

In general, the recommendation for convection ovens is to lower the temperature by about 25F / 15C (some newer ones with digital controls will do this automatically), but some people report problems with cakes being overly dense; I've heard different theories (eg, bernoulli effect lowering the pressure in the oven, causing the air bubbles to come out of the batter). Adding a tight covering of aluminium foil might help this, but it will cause other issues (eg, steaming the top).

Another recommendation I've seen for baking in a convection oven is to make sure that your oven has had sufficient time to pre-heat, then when putting in your baked goods, turn the oven off, and leave if off for 3-5 minutes before turning it back on. (this is typically to solve problems with baked goods appearing lopsided, as the fan's blowing so hard it's moving the batter around significantly).