What Can You Bake in an Air Fryer? What Works, What Doesn't, and What Actually Fits

My air fryer lives on the worktop because the oven takes twenty minutes to get anywhere and I am not a patient woman. Half an hour into an episode I'm hungry, and I've learnt the hard way to bake the thing first and eat it while I watch, rather than pausing the telly and sulking at a cold oven.

So yes, I bake in it. Quite a lot, actually.

But the honest version of this answer has two halves, and most articles only give you the first. Half one: an air fryer is a small fan oven, so almost anything you can bake, it can bake. Half two: your basket is about the size of a shoebox, and that is the bit that decides what you'll actually make.

The thing that stops most air fryer baking: what fits

Measure your basket before you buy anything. I mean it. This is the single most common reason people give up.

A standard 2lb loaf tin is roughly 25cm long. Most baskets won't take it, and the ones that will leave no airflow round the ends, which gives you a loaf that's scorched at the sides and gluey in the middle. A 1lb tin is about 20 x 10.5 x 6.5cm and slides in with room to spare. That difference — five centimetres — is the whole ballgame.

Trays are worse. Our 24 cup mini muffin tray is 39.5 x 27cm. It's a lovely tray and it is never going in an air fryer. Neither is a swiss roll tin, or a cookie sheet, or a standard 12-hole muffin tray. If you want the full range, our baking trays are built for an oven shelf and that's where they belong.

The rule of thumb: if your air fryer has at least 20 x 10cm of usable floor and a bit of headroom, a 1lb tin fits. Below that, you're into silicone moulds and paper cases.

All three are heavy-gauge carbon steel with a non-stick coating made without PFOA or PTFE, and every Wrenbury tin carries a 10-year guarantee. Browse the rest of the loaf tins if you want the sizes side by side, or the best loaf tin UK guide if you're choosing from scratch.

And one thing worth saying, because we get asked it every week: we're working on bakeware built for air fryer baskets from the start, rather than oven tins that happen to fit. Nothing to show yet. It's in progress, and it's worth checking back.

What genuinely works

Loaf cakes and tea breads. This is the air fryer's best trick and it isn't close. Banana bread, lemon drizzle, malt loaf, a date and walnut. A 1lb tin, twenty-five to thirty-five minutes, and you haven't warmed a single cubic foot of oven you didn't need. I've written the banana bread in the air fryer method out properly if you want a starting point.

Small batches of biscuits. Six at a time, on a bit of baking paper cut to size. They brown faster than in the oven and you get a crisper edge. Six is not many, but six is also exactly the number of biscuits a sensible person should make on a Tuesday.

Scones. Genuinely better than my oven, and I resent that slightly. The dry blast gives them a proper crust.

Brownies and traybakes, if you have a small square tin that fits. Deep, gooey, done in twenty minutes.

Individual things. Cupcakes in silicone cases, egg bites, mini quiches, a single crumble in a ramekin. Anything you'd otherwise heat a whole oven to make one of. If small bakes are your thing generally, the mini cake tins and the mini bundt cakes guide are the oven-based version of the same idea.

Reheating. Not baking, but worth saying: day-old bread, cold pastry and yesterday's pizza all come back better in an air fryer than in a microwave.

What doesn't work, and why

Anything tall. Cake rises. The heating element is right at the top. Sponge meets element, sponge scorches, and you've got a black lid on a raw cake. If it's going to climb, it's going in the oven.

Big celebration cakes. Two 6-inch sandwich tins are about the ceiling for most machines, and even then you're baking in stages. A three-tier is not an air fryer job. My decorating already looks like the cake was made by my kids; I don't need the bake fighting me too.

Anything with a loose wet batter that isn't in a tin. The fan is a fan. It will move your batter about.

Meringues and pavlova. They want low, long and still. An air fryer is high, short and windy.

Pastry with a loose top layer. Same reason. Anything light enough to lift will lift.

And a safety one, because it's a real hazard rather than a nuisance: never preheat with a sheet of baking paper in and nothing on top of it. The paper flies up, touches the element and catches. Put the food on the paper, and put both in together.

Why your air fryer cake burnt on top and stayed raw underneath

This is the complaint I see more than any other, and it has one cause. In an oven, the heat comes from all round. In an air fryer, it comes from an element about eight centimetres above your cake.

The fix is boring and it works.

One thing that surprised me: opening the drawer to check doesn't sink an air fryer cake the way opening an oven door can. The chamber's small and it reheats almost instantly. Check as often as you like.

Metal or silicone? Metal, and here's the caveat

A lot of people reach for silicone in an air fryer because they're worried a metal tin will scratch the non-stick basket. Fair worry. Wrong solution.

Silicone insulates. That's the entire problem. It holds the heat off the batter instead of passing it through, so you get a cake that browns beautifully on top — where the element is doing the work directly — and stays pale, dense and slightly damp underneath. I've read that exact description on forum after forum from people who assumed they'd done something wrong. They hadn't. The mould did it.

Carbon steel conducts. The base browns, the sides set, the cake comes out with the same structure it would have had in an oven. It's the same argument as why thin bakeware warps, from the other direction.

The scratch worry is easy to deal with: lower the tin in rather than sliding it, and lift it out rather than dragging. That's it. Metal against non-stick will mark it eventually — that's true of the basket and true of the tin — so go gently with both. The care and use guide covers keeping a coating in good shape for the full ten years, and how to make your baking tray last 10 years is the same routine written out at length.

The short version

An air fryer bakes small, fast and from the top. Play to that — loaf cakes, scones, six biscuits, one crumble — and it's the most useful thing on the worktop. Ask it to do a birthday cake and it will make you regret it.

Buy the tin that fits before you buy anything else. Everything follows from that.