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
Many of the manufacturer charts we have read carry baking rows, at a strikingly consistent 160°C for cake. They also, without exception, say to use a baking tin — which is the interesting part.
Cooking pages
- Cake in a tin — In a tin at 150–160°C; the published times run from twenty minutes to an hour, and they are not for the same amount of batter.
- Muffins — Thirteen to nineteen minutes at 160°C to 200°C, depending on the manufacturer.
- Quiche — Twenty to twenty-two minutes at 180°C, in a tin or oven dish.
This page gives no cooking answer of its own. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. Any figure mentioned above is one manufacturer’s, and the page for the cut says which machine, quantity and state it was printed for, or that the manufacturer named no state.