gift christmas cakes - help

[dosydot]

I have embarked on making most adults in my family homemade hampers this year and have been doing fine, until I went to make the xmas cakes this morning - Had decided to make 4" gift cakes from a traditional recipe , but have no idea how to convert the cooking times
I don't want to abandon the idea as have bought the bloody cake tin now.
Any recipes out there for this size cake or ideas on how long to cook it for??

I would halve the usual cooking time, but start checking the cake with a skewer before that. It will probably be trial and error for the first one, but after that you should have a fair idea of how long it takes.

where are you getting your hampers from?

Delia Smith has a guide to scaling up or down Christmas cake ingredients. This goes down to a 6" round cake and I reckon that a 4" cake would use half the ingredients of a 6" cake (or a quarter of the ingredients of a standard 8" cake). Cooking time would be around 2.5 hours - but would be longer if you were cooking two or more cakes at the same time.

2.5 hours sounds a long time to cook a 4" cake - that's how long my 8" one took!

Lovey- I have bought shopping baskets from Lakeland £4.99, and can be used afterwards - I refuse to by a basket sipmly to present stuff if it has no use afterwards.

Thanks all for your comments, if definately looks like it is going to be a little trial and error, I let you know whether its a sucess!

Thank you very much, I know what you mean - it seems such a waste. I shall definitly investigate!