Square baking pans are handy for making cakes and brownies, but that’s not all. We also use them for recipes such as Chocolate Fudge, Honey Cornbread, and Nanaimo Bars. Because we call for them in so many of our recipes, we decided to find out which of the many pans on the market was the best. We chose several models, made of various materials. To test them, we made yellow cake and brownies in each, sliced the cooled baked goods in the pans with a knife, and then washed the pans repeatedly to evaluate durability.
What did we discover? Most pans baked food well. The pans produced slightly different-looking cakes, one model couldn’t hide a glaring durability issue, and cleaning these pans was not always an easy task. Happily, though, we found several models that excelled.