How Many People Does a Sheet Cake Feed?
Planning a party? You don’t want to find yourself with too little or too much cake. Prepare accordingly with this super simple 3-step way to calculate just how many servings your sheet cake pan will produce.
First thing’s first: You’ll need to measure your pan. Here are some common sheet cake pan measurements:
Full sheet cake: 18” x 26”
Half sheet cake: 13” x 18”
Quarter sheet cake: 9” x 23”
OK, this is where things get slightly more complicated. If you’re not a math whiz, you may want to grab a calculator.
WATCH: How to Turn a Layer Cake Recipe into a Sheet Cake Recipe
Let’s say you’re using a full-sized sheet cake pan:
1. Find the area of your pan (if you’re having flashbacks to high school geometry, you’re not alone).
To find the area, multiply the width by the length.
18 × 26 = 468
2. Now, let’s say each of your slices will measure 2” x 2.” Find the slice’s surface in the same way you found the pan’s surface area.
2 × 2 = 4
3. Still with me? Good. Here’s the final step: Divide the pan’s surface area by the slice’s surface area.
468 ÷ 4 = 117
And there ya have it! A full-sized sheet cake pan will produce 117 2” x 2” pieces.
Is your pan smaller? No worries—we did the math for you.
A half-sized sheet pan will make 58 servings and a quarter-sized pan will make 30 servings.
If you suspect your guests will try to sneak slightly larger pieces of cake (no judgment here), just perform the steps above with different slice dimensions.
