Baking and desserts
Cakes and bakes
Possible, consistently published, and the one category where the manuals all tell you to put the food in a tin.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
A cake batter is a liquid that has to set into a foam, and moving air is hostile to that in two ways: it dries and sets the top surface before the middle has risen, and it can physically disturb a wet batter. Both are why the published temperature is thirty to forty degrees below what the same appliance uses for chips, and why the manuals insist on a tin — the tin shields the batter from direct airflow and turns the appliance into a small convection oven. A cake baked directly in a drawer is not a cake baked slightly worse; it is a different and much less successful thing.
Why the cut matters
Every manufacturer chart read this sprint carries baking rows, at a strikingly consistent 160°C for cake and around twenty-five minutes. They also, without exception, say to use a baking tin — which is the interesting part.
Cooking pages
- Cake in a tin — Twenty to twenty-five minutes at 160°C, in a tin, agreed across four manufacturers.
- Muffins — Fifteen to eighteen minutes, at 180°C or 200°C depending on the manufacturer.
- Quiche — Twenty to twenty-two minutes at 180°C, in a tin or oven dish.
There is deliberately no cooking time on this page. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. That is what the pages above are for.