Mary Berry cake tin question

[emilyamc]

Hi I’m looking to make the Victoria sponge cake from Mary Berry Fast Cake Cookbook. The recipe is here
The recipe calls for 2 x 20cm round sandwich tins.
I need to buy the tins first and get confused with what depth of tins would be best as the 20cm tins I’ve been looking at vary between 3.5cm - 7cm high. Thanks

I’d go the higher end. 3.5cm seems very shallow for a cake - more like a tart depth?
if you go with a deeper tin the batter will only fill what it needs to fill anyway - it is dependent on the width not the depth

They won't be very high layers but the higher tins will be more versatile for other things if you can fit both in your oven easily. The lower 3.5cm is too low really for anything useful, the ideal height would be around 5cm for making single layers. A useful alternative if you don't want to be buying tins of varying sizes is the disposable (although I wash and use many times!) tinfoil flan cases, they come in varying sizes and are usually perfectly high enough for a single layer of victoria sandwich size. If in doubt you can always line with a strip of parchment around the side slightly higher than the tin, I always do that anyway even for normal tins.