I'm a total dummy when it comes to baking so I've got to ask advice. My wife, who is no longer capable of baking, always made a Xmas cake from a recipe in an old Readers Digest " The Cookery Year" book. The cake was always excellent and I want to have a go at making it. The recipe calls for 1 1/2 hours @ 300 deg F and a further 2 to 2 1/2 hours @ 250 deg F. I want to make the cake half the size of the original recipe and have accordingly halved all the ingredients.
There is nothing wrong with halving the scale of the recipe. The two things to take into account are the size of tin it is cooked in and the cooking time.
You need to calculate the volume of mixture going into the tin, let us say that the recipe says a 10inch tin which is typically 3 inches high. That gives a volume of approx 235 cubic inches. Halve the ingredients and you will have about 118 cubic inches.
Smaller tins are often about 2.5 inches high, so you need to work out what size of tin would you use to handle the smaller amount and it is not a 5 inch diameter tin! It would roughly require a 7 or 8 inch tin.
In terms of the temperature, the same temperature should be kept, but the cooking time is likely to be around 2/3rds, say an hour at 300 and 1 and a half at 250.
