Welcome to the Cake Decorators Q&A

Hi all

Just wondering what you experienced cakers prefer for a wedding cake either 3″ or 4″

Im making my first wedding cake and made a 8″ fruit cake in a 3″ tin as a practice and although covered with marzipan and sugarpaste doesn’t look very deep. (think it only came out as 2 1/2″)

The bottom tier fruit cake im making is going to be 12″ round and am thinking of buying a 4″ deep pan.

As the recipe i have is for 3″ deep am thinking of using the ingredients for either 14″ or 16″ and filling pan to the top and cooking for longer so I get 4″ depth. Do you think this will work?

Would love to know what depth cake you all prefer for a wedding

I love 4″ deep cakes always makes them look so much more professional in my opinion. I use 8 eggs in my 8″ cake recipe alone. What your best doing for such a large cake is splitting the mix and baking 2 then joint together.

I think this is mostly personal preference, I bake all my cakes in three inch pans and they look pretty big to me. If you want to do them in the three inch pans you could use several boards to give them height or even use dummies. I wouldn’t fill the pans to the very top because you will still get a certain amount of rise and you’d be risking an over flow of mixture. I think perhaps just above two thirds would be enough without that risk. I bake my 10″ fruit cakes for a total of 6 hours. The first 1hr 15 minutes at 140c fan assisted to form it’s structure and the reminder time at 120c fan to bake slowly without burning. You would have to bake the 14″ for a lot longer (possibly as long as 10 hours on very low) and all ovens are different. I’ve never made a two layer fruit cake before so wouldn’t know whether they would stick together like sponge or madeira which normally has a filling in the middle to hold it together.