Baking – What temperature and time do I need to bake a 35cm Madeira cake

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I am cooking a very large wedding cake (35 cm or 14 inch) and can't get the cooking time right. Is there a specific temperature I should use?

Best Answer

It's very difficult to cook a cake that large without a heating core.

Basically, it's a metal cup that you put in the middle of your cake so that you can get some heat conduction in the middle of the cake, like you would with a bundt pan or other ring-shaped pan. Unlike the ring pan, as it's a cup, you also fill it with batter so you have a plug to fill the hole that's created.

(and you generally need to fill the cup with either batter or something else heavy so that it doesn't float in the batter).

You also want to go with a lower temperature and bake it for longer -- this is not only because of the size of the cake, but you also want it to be more dense; if you're going to be stacking on top of it, you do not want it spongy, and you need to reduce the amount of open spring from a high temperature. I'd highly recommend looking for recipes specifically intended for large stacked cakes.

As medeira cakes tend to be slow cooking to start with, you might be looking at 1.5 to 2hrs to get it fully baked through.

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