A Christmas cake bakes for hours, so a shallow sandwich tin won’t do. The fruit around the edge starts to scorch long before the middle is cooked. You want a deep, solid tin, a good lining, and something wrapped around the outside. Here’s the tin I’d buy, then how to stop the edges burning.
The tin
For the classic 8-inch cake most recipes are written for, I’d get the MasterClass 20cm Deep Round Cake Tin with Loose Base. It’s been around for years, and it has thousands of reviews on Amazon UK with a very high average, which is about as safe a bet as bakeware gets.
What the listing says you get:
- 20cm (8 inch) across and 9.5cm tall, so there’s room for a rich fruit cake that rises a little above the mixture line
- 1mm thick steel, which the maker says resists warping
- A loose base, so you push the cake up and out instead of turning it upside down
- A double-layer non-stick coating that’s PFAS-free
- Dishwasher safe
Thickness matters more than people think. A thin tin passes heat straight through to the cake, and over a long bake that’s how you get a dark, bitter crust. A heavier tin heats up more slowly and more evenly.
The loose base is a bonus with fruit cake. The mixture is thick enough that it won’t leak through the join, and a heavy cake full of fruit is much easier to push out from below than to flip out of a solid tin.
If your recipe is for a different size, the same tin comes in 15, 18, 23, 25 and 30cm versions.
How to stop the edges burning
Even a good tin needs help for a bake this long. This is the old-fashioned method, and it still works:
- Line it twice. Two layers of baking parchment on the base and up the sides, with the side strip standing a few centimetres above the rim. Yes, even with a non-stick tin. It’s insulation as much as anything.
- Wrap the outside. Fold a long strip of brown paper or a few sheets of newspaper so it’s a bit taller than the tin, wrap it round the outside and tie it on with kitchen string. This slows down the heat getting in at the sides, which is where burning starts.
- Go low. Follow your recipe, but rich fruit cakes are almost always baked at a low temperature for a long time. If your oven runs hot, it’ll show up here first.
- Cover the top if it browns too early. Lay a sheet of parchment loosely over the top partway through.
- Test with a skewer in the very middle. It should come out clean, apart from the odd smear of sticky fruit.
Let it cool completely in the tin before you push it out. Fruit cake is fragile while it’s warm.
Anything else you’ll need?
If you’re going to marzipan and ice it, a turntable makes it a lot easier. We’ve written about whether you really need one. If you bake cheesecakes too, the springform tin post covers a better tin for that job, since a loose base like this one can leak with a runny filling.
