Solidly built, with light gold nonstick coating, this pan produced tall, fluffy, level cakes that were just a hair less evenly browned than our winner. Layers shaped up perfectly, no matter how the pan was greased. Upside-down cake and pizza released and browned well, but cinnamon buns were too pale. At half the price of our winner, this pan is a great option.
Our Guide to Savory Baking
You can use much of the same gear you use for baking sweet desserts. And we've reviewed everything you need.
This 8-inch version of our winning cake pan produced tall, level, evenly baked, and delicate yellow cakes. Due to the pan’s lighter color, cinnamon buns and pan pizza needed a bit more time in the oven to become fully browned. Since we use these pans primarily for baking cakes, we’ll continue to reach for this durable nonstick pan for its superior cake-baking abilities. More on this test
This folded metal pan produced tall, picture-perfect pound cake and sandwich bread with crisp corners. Like all folded pans, it lacked handles and had crevices in the corners that trapped food. We had to clean it very carefully. The corrugated pattern on the metal didn't affect the appearance of the baked goods. It still scratched slightly.
This pan's rounded corners created baked goods with rounded edges that lacked the polish and refinement of foods baked in higher-ranking pans. The trade-off is that it's much easier to clean. The raised bumps at the bottom of the pan deflected and concealed knife marks, though the inside walls still scratched slightly.
This pin capably handled dough for pie, cookies, pizza, and yeasted rolls, with gentle weight and a slightly textured surface that holds a dusting of flour for less sticking. Its long, straight shape made achieving even dough thickness and rolling out larger disks easy.
With an ergonomic Santoprene rubber handle and a balanced, lightweight feel, this whisk was like an extension of a hand. It whipped cream and egg whites quickly, thanks to 10 wires that were thin enough to move through the liquid quickly but thick enough to push through heavy mixtures and blend pan sauces to smoothness.
Everything prepared in this sturdy, warp-resistant sheet cooked appropriately and evenly. Best of all, our new favorite is a few bucks cheaper than our old winner.
These precut parchment sheets, which come in a large plastic zipper-lock bag, are the only ones in our lineup that are stored completely flat. They're also sized just right to slide easily into a standard rimmed baking sheet, although we did have to use two overlapping sheets when rolling jelly roll cakes into coils. Their superior convenience made them the runaway favorite. Don't let the purchase price distract you: The per-sheet cost falls squarely in the middle of our lineup.
This model did a relatively good job of cutting pizza slices, though it sometimes required multiple tries to get through thick or crunchy crusts. It had a cushy, grippy handle, but it was shorter and skinnier than OXO’s previous iteration, making it slightly less comfortable for users with larger hands to hold.
This pan was the priciest of the lot but produced perfectly even golden-brown tarts with crisp, professional-looking edges. Its nonstick coating made the transfer from pan to plate a cinch.
Our winning scraper’s versatile teardrop shape allowed us to choose between a more narrowly curved edge for smaller bowls and a broader edge for wider bowls. Its metal core kept it sufficiently rigid in our hands while handling dense cookie dough, and its flexible silicone edges left more delicate doughs intact as we handled them. This scraper was both easy to clean and durable. One tester found this scraper the slightest bit small, but it fit comfortably in most of our hands, and we liked how nimble it felt.
This powerful, smartly designed machine made quick work of large and small volumes of food. The bent tines of its whisk fit the bowl’s shape perfectly, its Y-shaped paddle creamed quickly without allowing butter to bunch up in the crevices, and the model handled batches of stiff dough without flinching. Testers liked the bowl-lift design and large vertical bowl handle that aided pouring.
This mixer aced nearly every test, with the exception of the high-hydration pizza dough, flawlessly completing everything from the most basic of tasks (such as whipping two egg whites) to making enough frosting for a three-layer cake. The speed controls and tilt-head lever were straightforward and simple to operate, and the bowl and attachments were easy to put on and take off. We do wish that the bowl had a handle and that the price (about $250) was a bit more relative to the mixer's size (the KitchenAid Classic Plus Series 4.5 Quart Tilt-Head Stand Mixer is about $230); however, if you want a smaller machine, this is a great option.