Cake tin with no base!

[Dancergirl]

It's dd's party at the weekend and she has asked for an 8 shaped chocolate cake. I have reserved an 8 cake tin to hire from my local cake shop but it has no base, just some metal struts.

The lady in the shop told me to put it on a baking sheet with baking paper and scrunch foil round the edges to stop leakage. Sounds a bit worrying though and I haven't got the time or inclination to start again if it goes wrong.

I'm thinking of buying my own tin now but it seems a bit silly to spend £10+ on something I'll use once (dd is the youngest!).

If you make a standard sponge or madeira with butter, and the cake mix is not runny, then it should be fine.

Or you could just use ordinary round cake tins. Bake two round cakes, cut out a central core about 1/3 the diameter of each cake, then take a thin slice off one edge of each cake. Place the trimmed edges together and voila! A number 8.

As OinkBalloon said, or use a Garland/Savarin pan (like Marry Berry used in the Great British Bake-Off last year for the Cherry Cake in Round 1. That way you will have a nicely rounded form with baked, not cut, edges the whole way round. You will have to cut a couple of flats to put the two circles together of course, but you will have no exposed cut edges so the cake will not dry out as quickly.

Believe it or not whilst I was getting changed at the gym this morning someone asked a lady who bakes cakes professionally this very question and the advice she gave was exactly as you were told OP.

She said that you could use anything for a base that was suitable to go in the oven, but that no matter what you used it was important to use the tinfoil to prevent leakage.

What a coincidence milly!

I actually quite like the idea of oink's suggestion of using round cake tins and cutting out. I'm just worrying that even with the scrunched tinfoil around it, it still might leak and I'll get into a rage

But the round cake tin method could go wrong too what with all the cutting out and sticking together etc.....