Baking for a Crowd: How to Adjust a Recipe to Meet Your Needs

Baking for a Crowd: How to Adjust a Recipe to Meet Your Needs

Baking for a crowd is a great way to bring people together and to share your favorite sweets recipes with people you love. However, baking for a large group of people can be a huge hassle. This guide will give you some helpful cheats for baking for a crowd. Whether you bake for potlucks, large family dinners, or bake sales, this guide is sure to come in handy. We'll give you advice on how to choose a baking dish to make sure everyone gets a piece of cake, and how to alter a recipe for a different size baking dish. 

Choosing Your Baking Dish

Recipes don't always list how many people they can serve. However, you can judge the amount of servings a recipe will yield by the baking dish it instructs you to use. Keep in mind that the number of people a recipe will serve varies depending on how large you cut the pieces. Our guide uses a liberal piece size rather than a "wedding size" piece.

Adjusting Baking Time 

Sometimes you come across the perfect recipe, but you need to double it or adapt it for another size baking dish. Different size dish will require different baking times. Usually desserts made in small or shallow dishes require less time in the oven. However, since baking is a science, times will also differ depending on which ingredients you used and how much. Bread and cake will have very different bake times, for example.

Keep in mind that adapting a recipe for a dish with different dimensions is not exact, so keep an eye on your cake to prevent over-baking or under-baking your dessert. Typically you'll get the best results if you stick with the recipe as-is, but you don't want to have to abandon a recipe just because you don't have the exact dish it calls for. If your cake doesn't look done after the suggested baking time, we recommend putting it back in the oven and checking every 5 minutes to avoid a dry cake. Here are our suggested baking times for the most commonly used baking dishes:

10 x 13  sheet cake pan                            20–30 minutes

9 x 13 inch baking dish                              35–40 minutes

8 x 8 inch baking dish                                30–35 minutes

9 x 9 inch baking dish                                35 minutes

8 x 8 round dish                                         20–25 minutes

9 x 9 round dish                                         25–35 minutes

To avoid having too much left over batter, check out this post by Comfortably Domestic. It has a handy conversion chart that you can consult when adjusting a recipe for a different baking dish. 

Do you have any tips for baking for a crowd? Let us know in the comments!