stupid question about traybake from baking novice

jellyhead

Hi, just wondering if anyone can help me? I'm useless without a recipe, but unfortunately the recipe my son wants to use (and has already shown to the teacher) didn't tell us the size of tray or the gas mark.

Looking through the various recipes on here it seems that this recipe would use gas mark 4 or 5, and a 12 by 9 inch tray?

http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/10025/coconut-and-raisin-scrummy-tray-bake-cake.aspx

he broke my glass dish last week though, and I don't want to give him another glass one so I am wondering about adapting it to fit a 9x9 foil tray instead - smaller would be better anyhow because we can't eat that much cake!!

Is this going to be dry? It seems to be more dry stuff than the recipes I've seen, and my eggs aren't large, so would you use 4? I don't really want him to add milk because he won't put it in the fridge so it will warm up for the 6 hours before his cooking lesson.

Using a smaller foil tray would it work out if I use 3 quarters of the ingredients, but use 3 eggs?

sorry to be so flustered, and ignorant about baking, but he only told me last night, after yesterday's lesson.

BitterAndTwisted

There's plenty of butter in that recipe so I doubt it will turn out dry and the description says it's a moist cake so that confirms it. I agree with you that it's a ruddy daft recipe to not give you the oven temp or a specific size for the tin: what's "largish" supposed to mean? I suspect that your 9x9 tray would be fine as long as the sides are high enough to allow for the mixture rising. I'd be tempted to use a roasting tin lined with baking parchment or greaseproof paper or even foil in a pinch. If you're going to make the recipe using 3/4 of the quantity I'd use two eggs but in this sort of recipe the number and size of the eggs might not be critical. Will you let us know how you get on as this recipe sounds rather nice?

jellyhead

will do, thanks I suppose it is a large amount of butter, yes.

I thought about getting him to make it tonight as a practise, to see how it goes but I can't really afford that much butter.

It's a foil tray he'll be using. I don't bake much, so I don't know if it needs parchment, but the cookery book I was reading last week says that long-striplining a tin (so the ends poke over, making it easy to lift it out) is easiest.

jellyhead

We did a practise run, thankfully! there's too much mixture for our tin, so it ended up quite a tall cake and took much longer to cook, so he couldn't have made it in the timeslot they give him at school.

He's going to use 2 thirds of the ingredients in the same tray tomorrow.

It's really yummy! not sure about moist though, but that's probably because we overcooked it.