About an hour from now I will be putting dark fruitcakes into the oven.
The Joy of Cooking recipe that I'm using calls for baking a ten-inch tube pan at 300 F for 3 1/2 hours, noting that it may appear done at 2 1/2 but that that should ignored, exept for tenting foil over it if it gets too dark on top.
I don't want to use a tube pan. I want to use small loaf pans, 8 x 4 x 2 inches.
How long should I bake them for?
And yes, I should have asked a week ago.
Still 3 1/2 hours. The depth and width of the bread will be about the same as in the tube pan -- thinking of the center hole of the tube pan as equivalent to one edge of the loaf pan.
May be too late now, but I just looked at my favorite recipe (which I haven't made in years) and it says 2-3 hours, depending on pan size.
I looked up a bunch of recipes on Google Books. As a rule of thumb, the ones that gave both tube pan and loaf pan directions seemed to bake tube pans about 1/3 longer than loaf pans. (e.g. 3 hours in a tube pan; 2 hours in a loaf pan).
After posting, I was thinking along Midwesterner's lines. If anything, the cross section of these loaves is a little bigger than that of a tube pan cake. On the other hand, the heat is coming at these things from the ends of the loaf pan too.
But nutrax gives me food for thought. Now I'm thinking maybe 2 1/2 hours, or a bit more. They've been in about half that. The kitchen smells great.
Have you ever thought about how silly it is that American recipes almost always start by telling you to preheat the oven? If I had done that first, it would have been preheating for more than two hours while I chopped nuts and fruit etc.
I've seen "energy saving tips" along the lines of "don't bother to preheat if you are cooking something low & slow."
