Buttermilk Birthday Cake Quantities

Asked by stressedcakebaker. Answered on 22nd May 2016

Full question

Hi, I'm hoping to use the Buttermilk Birthday Cake recipe for the top 3 tier of a wedding cake. Have you got any suggestions for how I adapt the quanitites for 8-inch, 6-inch and 4-inch round tins? Thanks.

Our answer

Nigella's Buttermilk Birthday Cake (from HOW TO BE A DOMESTIC GODDESS) is popular for birthday cakes as it works well in shaped cake pans, as well as round and square tins. The cake recipe should be enough to make a two-layer 8-inch (20cm) round cake with two 8-inch sandwich tins. In theory this should mean that you need a half quantity of the recipe for a 6-inch (15cm) cake and a quarter quantity for a 4-inch (10 cm) cake. For half an egg just use the yolk.

However cake scaling can be a bit tricky and we have not tested these quantities, so would very much suggest making test versions of this size in advance of making the full wedding cake. The cake freezes well un-iced so the sponge layers can also be made up to 3 months in advance and frozen, tightly wrapped in a double layer of clingfilm (plastic wrap) and a layer of foil. We would also mention that the cake is not robust enough to stack the tiers on their own, so you will need to use dowelling in the bottom and middle layers.