I'm known as the office baker, and pre-pandemic I would bring in a cake, cookies, and other treats on a weekly basis. Having dozens of eager recipients helped me maintain my waistline while still indulging in my favorite hobby. For the past year, however, visits to the office have been few and far between as we have been fortunate enough to work from home. My baking desire continued, but I realized early on that making full-size treats for just the two of us was not going to be a workable solution unless I wanted to buy a wardrobe consisting solely of muumuus. Therefore I decided to downsize my baking. It is easy enough to bake a half batch of cookies, but reducing the size of a cake can be tricky. Bill Clark of Epicurious takes the apprehension out of downsizing cakes by showing how to easily turn an 8- or 9-inch cake into a six-incher.

I used this technique in the Eat Your Books Cookbook Club a couple of months ago when Yossy Arefi's Snacking Cakes was the featured baking volume. (If you don't already have Snacking Cakes on your bookshelf, you must buy it right now. It's one of my favorite baking books of 2020.) I wanted to try a lot of different cakes, but didn't want to waste a bunch of ingredients. So I halved the recipes (meant for a 9-inch cake pan) and baked them in a 6-inch pan, and it worked great, as the above photo shows. As Clark points out, the math is a bit more complicated if you want to be precise, but I found that halving was good enough for my purposes.

I use a similar downsizing process with Bundt cake recipes: if a recipe calls for a 10- or 12-cup Bundt pan, I will make a half recipe in a 6-cup Bundt. If there is excess batter, I use a mini-loaf pan to make an additional tiny loaf.

Baking times can vary greatly when downsizing cakes, and the Epicurious article covers that subject as well. Interestingly, Clark says that he doesn't reduce the amount of frosting when he makes small cakes. He feels like having the full amount provides enough extra to do more decorations, or you can freeze the icing for use later - most buttercreams freeze well, but meringue-style frostings do not.

Photo of Orange-poppy seed cake with raspberry glaze from Snacking Cakes: Simple Treats for Anytime Cravings by Yossy Arefi