You'll need to experiment to get your timing and quantities right. Although the recipe for 6 eggs took 30 minutes to cook, the same recipe scaled up to double quantities in a 10 inch tin took over 2 1/2 hours in my oven.

You'll get a better idea of cooking time and quantities from your trial run, but this is the quantity I used for my 6 inch square tin. The result was a very deep cake. I scaled it up to 8 eggs for the 8 inch tin, but probably should have used 10. For the 10 inch tin, I doubled these quantities (12 eggs etc). I could have got more in the tin, but not in my mixing bowls.

Ingredients for coffee cake

• 12oz margarine

• 12oz self raising flour

• 12oz caster sugar

• 6 eggs

• 1 teaspoon instant coffee for each egg used

Instructions

• Dissolve the coffee in just enough boiling water, and leave it to cool.

• Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C.

• Grease your cake tin with oil or margarine. If your cake tin is not a springform, you may find it easier to line it with greaseproof paper as well. In that case, grease both the tin and the inside of the paper.

• Mix the margarine with the sugar.

• Beat the eggs with a fork, and add them to the sugar mixture.

• Add the coffee mixture.

• Sift the flour and fold it into the mixture.

• Transfer the mixture into the cake tin.

• Bake for 30 minutes or until firm (bigger cakes will take much longer).

Bear in mind that one difference between baking a wedding cake and a normal cake is that you don't want the wedding cake to rise too much if it has to end up flat. If the cake is very deep, you can level the top off with a long horizontally held knife. If one of your cakes does not have much extra height (the middle one, in my case), you can turn it upside down so the top is flat and fill in the missing gaps under the bottom corners with extra bits cut off the other cakes (see the photo).

 

I froze my cakes for several weeks, as I made them ahead of time in case of disasters. In some ways you'd think a solid frozen cake might be easier to work with, and it is easier to lift onto the cake boards and stand at this point, but it is also slightly drier as well, so perhaps a bit more crumbly.