Some cakes don’t scale up or down well during baking - a double batch of sponge cake in a larger tin (i.e. therefore deeper and wider) may come out uncooked in the middle and crumbly at the edges - and a fruit cake divided into muffins may burn before it’s cooked long enough.
In yet other cases, doubling the amount may just mean going beyond the reasonable capacity of the oven or hob to add heat to a thing. If you want to cook ten times the amount of boiled potatoes, you can put them in a pan that’s ten times the size, and although it will eventually come to the boil on a standard hotplate, the timing is vastly altered and it’s likely that some potatoes will be cooked to mush, whilst others are underdone.
Not in depth cites for chemical leaveners, but this one lists a few simple rationales, and this points out the chemistry problem with the volumetric approach used in most home kitchens as opposed to weight.
Ah, well, that’s an important caveat. I pointed out the problem with volumetric measurements. For me, proportional is by weight, not volume, but I can see where others would interpret that differently.
It is, which is why for scalability, I keep certain recipes by weight instead of volume. Like, for example, my Hungarian stew recipe, my important ratio is 2:1 by weight of meat to onions, but the other stuff you can fudge a little by taste. It also makes shopping a hell of a lot easier, because you don’t have to worry about what exactly a “large” onion is. You buy a certain weight of meat, you throw half as many by weight onions on the scale, and you’re good to go. Or with something like lecsó, which is 2:1:1 by weight of paprika to onions to tomatoes. Consistent and reproducible results every time, no fuss, no muss, no matter the scale.
It goes into the ratios between key ingredients–flour, liquid, fat, sugar, egg–make different products. Some of it is method, but ratios between ingredients determine whether you end up with bread dough, sponge cake batter, pound cake batter, pie dough, pasta dough, biscuit dough, pancake batter, and so on.
I can categorically state that if you are making cyser, and one batch calls for 1 tbsp whole cloves, if you are doubling the batch DO NOT double the amount of cloves … you can actually use the same amount od whole cloves for up to a triple batch. If you double the cloves with the rest f the ingredients, you will end up with a cyser that might as well be used to dab on toothaches :eek:
I was making cyser for a competition and decided I might as well double the batch so I could have some for the camp to drink as well. When it came time to taste to correct any deficiencies, it about knocked our socks off with the amazing cloviness of it all. We had to restart with all new ingredients. The single amount of cloves for 5 gallons of cyser flavored the same for the 10 gallon batch, and later for the 15 gallon batch.
There are reasons why I work in an office now.