How to line cake and muffin tins

Different techniques to line cake and muffin tins

We’re going to show you how to line some cake tins today. We’ve got different techniques depending on which cake you want to bake.

How to line a cake tin for a Victoria sponge

If you wanted to do a Victoria sponge what you do is take some kitchen towel and you just push the butter around the edges and the base of the tin and then you put some flour in the bottom of it and you rotate it around and then you bang the tin to get rid of any excess flour and you have a perfectly lined tin. You can use flour, that gives you a lovely soft crust, or you could use caster sugar, that gives you a lovely crunchy edge to the side of your Victoria sponge.

Lining cake tins for heavier cakes

But what we’re going to show you now is how to line a square or a round cake tin that you might use for a fruit cake or a heavy chocolate cake that might take, say, longer than 20 minutes. Because you’re trying to prevent the cake from burning round the edges.

So what you do is you take your cake tin and put it to one side. Take the baking paper and you pull a good amount out. You put the tin on top of the paper and you get a pencil and you run around the outside of the tin. Then to save cutting it out twice, you fold the paper in half and then you cut it at the end there. And then you only have to cut out once.

So you go on the inside of the line so they will fit snugly into the tin, which I’ve done here, so you end up with two discs. Use two discs of paper so that you can line the bottom of the tin so that when you cook a rich fruit cake it doesn’t burn so easily.

Then what we need to do is make a collar for the tin. So you take, again, a good length of baking paper and using your thumb you just hold the tin, at the bottom there holding with the thumb, and run it along. And this will give you the circumference of the tin. And you take it to there, so that I know that that will go all the way around the tin. Get a pair of scissors and cut it there. Then what you want to do is to fold it into 3 equal pieces, like so. And that gives you a god sort of depth of baking paper so that it really won’t burn the outsides of the cake.

Now then you want to fold in about 3 to 4 centimetres from there. And what we’re going to do is create a fringe. And you do that all the way along and just smooth it along with the bottom of your hand. And then take a pair of scissors and you want to snip along there about two to three centimetres along, creating a little fringe there. And you continue all along the turned up piece of paper, ending up with something like this. Then you don’t need to butter the tin or anything.

All you do is take one disc, put that in the base like so, then get your baking parchment and carefully just push it into all the sort of sides. And once you get the cake mixture in it’ll fill out properly anyway so don’t worry about it too much. And then you put your final disc on top so you’ve got your fringing there and then the disc of paper. Now if it’s too high for your tin, that should be fine, but you can trim it down. Then you put any fruit cake mixture in there or a heavy chocolate mixture. The same principle is with the square tin.

How to line a muffin tin

Now anyone who hasn’t got any muffin cases, often I’m short of them, you don’t need to rush out and go and buy any. Especially if you’re doing sort of savoury muffins or breakfast muffins, anything like that.

What you want to do is take another length of baking paper and just put your tin on top so you can see the size of the holes that you’re trying to cut to. Just bear in mind there’s a depth to the muffin itself on either side so you need to cut a square, slightly larger by about two centimetres on each side of the size of the hole, to about that. And then you just want to test it to make sure that is about right, like so.

And then what you can do is cut another 11 out to fill up your muffin tin. And then with any odds and ends of the baking parchment that are left over from cooking, so you don’t waste anything, you can use a bit of butter and you can put that around the tin and pop them in. This just holds them there a little bit while you’re putting the cake mixture in. And then you continue the process 11 times and then you get a perfect lined muffin case ready for those delicious breakfast muffins.