Buy at Williams SonomaBaking with our favorite 13 by 9-inch cake pan, the Williams Sonoma Goldtouch Pro Nonstick Rectangular Cake Pan, is a pleasure. It produces evenly baked, golden-brown cakes with tall sides and crisp corners. It also bakes up consistently well-browned sticky buns. Its nonstick coating easily releases all food baked in it, including sticky sugary syrup.
We can’t think of a piece of cookware that’s more basic than the 13 by 9-inch metal baking pan, but we also can’t think of one that’s more essential. It’s the vessel that we pull out for everything from sheet cakes and sticky buns to brownies and bar cookies. At first glance it might seem as though any one of the generic-looking metal boxes on store shelves would do just fine. But you’d be surprised: Choose the wrong one and your cake won’t bake evenly, and the sticky part of your sticky buns will stick to the pan, not the buns. We baked Yellow Sheet Cake and Sticky Buns in pans of different materials and designs and compared the results.
What to Look For
- Golden-Colored Pans: Golden pans produced tall, delicately colored, evenly baked yellow sheet cake. Sticky buns baked in golden pans were perfectly bronzed as well.
- A Slick Nonstick Coating: We often line pans with a foil sling when making brownies and bars, guaranteeing easy removal, but a nonstick coating is essential for any recipe in which you might need to invert the pan to release the food once baked, such as an upside-down cake or sticky buns. Pans with slick nonstick coatings easily released the food baked in them, including sticky sugary syrup. They were also simpler to clean.
- Straight Walls: Pans with straight walls produced straight, tall, evenly baked cakes.
- Crisp Corners: We preferred pans that had sharp, 90-degree (rather than curved) corners. Pans with these sharp corners produce cakes and bars with well-defined, professional-looking edges.
- Handles: When we’re carrying pans in and out of the oven, it’s nice to have a place to rest our hands. A few of the pans in our lineup had dedicated handles that made it easy to securely grip even with bulky oven mitts on.
What to Avoid
- Pans Without A Nonstick Coating: We found that sticky buns baked in pans without nonstick coatings either had to be chiseled out one by one or, if they did release from the pan, left behind nearly all their glaze. You can use parchment paper and baking spray to avoid this, but we prefer not to.
- Deeply Sloped Walls: Walls with deeply sloped sides had added surface area that allowed the batter to spread out more and ultimately resulted in thinner cakes.
- Multi-part Baking Dishes: Most of the pans in our lineup were made from a single piece of metal, but two pans were made from two pieces of bakeware. One was a pan with a removable bottom; it leaked the sticky buns’ sugary glaze, filling the kitchen with smoke and leaving the buns bare. We experienced the same leakage problems with another product, a metal frame that sits in a 13 by 9-inch sheet pan to create an instant baking dish. Sticky bun glaze leaked and burned, and cornbread batter oozed under and baked the removable bottom right into the bread.
Other Considerations
- Dark Pans: Darker-colored pans absorb heat more efficiently than light-colored pans, so they brown foods more quickly and deeply than lighter-colored ones. Although this isn’t necessarily bad, it’s important to understand that when baking food in it, you’ll need to check its doneness a few minutes sooner than when you would check doneness in a cake baked in a light pan. Darker pans sometimes produced cakes that were slightly domed, which can make stacking, icing, and decorating them more difficult.
