Why You Should Think Twice About Baking Cake In Nonstick Nesting Pans

You've finished preparing your cake batter and it's ready to go in the oven. The obvious next step is to grab the first round pan you see. Unfortunately, your bake could end poorly if you reached for a nonstick nesting pan. Size aside, not all round cake pans are the same, and a nonstick nesting pan is one of the worst choices for baking a cake, Serious Eats explains.

If you're not familiar with the term, nonstick nesting pans are the type of cake pans that have handles on each side. They're designed to stack (or "nest") perfectly together for easy storage, but for the same reason, they're also slightly angled along the sides, much like a pie tin. They might appear perfectly round, but a nonstick nesting pan will leave you with a cake that has slanted sides. That may be acceptable for a standalone cake with one layer, but if you're planning to stack multiple cakes and want them to look even, a nonstick nesting pan definitely is not the way to go. In any case, the problems that nonstick nesting pans can bring do go beyond a cake's shape.

Nonstick nesting pans change the way your cake bakes

In addition to yielding cakes with slanted sides, nonstick nesting pans also tend to result in cakes that are overcooked, Taste of Home shares. The coating on nonstick cookware that allows you to remove the cake from the pan with ease is the same material that will cause a cake to overcook. Because the material is darker in color than that of an aluminum pan, it more readily absorbs and retains heat. The bottom and sides of the cake will therefore brown at a higher rate, since the pan gets hotter and heats up faster, which means that by the time the middle is cooked through, the bottom and sides will be overcooked.

A better option is to use an aluminum cake pan with straight instead of slanted sides. You'll have to make sure your pan is greased and lined, but you won't have to worry about your cake being overcooked, or have to trim the sides down to make it even enough to stack.