To bake a cake, you’ll need a pan. But that doesn’t mean that you always have to stick to standard circle or square shapes. Why not have some fun with a novelty cake pan? This clever cake pan has built-in dividers so that the cake bakes up in perfectly controlled portions. Perfect for ensuring even serving sizes, but also a fun opportunity to decorate each slice all-over with icing or have guests decorate their own slice! Although this cake pan is not in production (yet), it deserves a spot on this list because it’s just so darn cool! The Ribbon is a modular baking pan that allows you to control the shape and the size of the baking area by using a flexible silicone band that you can shape any way you’d like, that attaches to the steel baking sheet with magnets. Photo via Munchkin Munchies These cookies have a secret: they’re actually cake! Sweetly designed to resemble an Oreo cookie wafer, these cake layers are fantastic when filled with a generous amount of icing to give the visual look of the cookie’s creme filling.
Of course, you could use lots of extra icing and make it a Double Stuff... $19.99 at Bed Bath & Beyond. Photo via Chef’s Resource Are you constantly craving a corner piece? Always get your way with this pan, designed so that every piece is an edge, and there are way more than four corners! While this pan was popularized as a solution for brownies, it works well with cake batter, too. $34.95 at Chef’s Resource.For a fun treat that won’t melt in your hand, bake up small cakes with popsicle sticks inserted in the batter. Kids (and adults for that matter) will love decorating these whimsical treats. A delicious homage to the beloved childhood toy! Bake up a few cakes and frost them with primary colors to really bring the theme home. Since this mold is made of silicone, it also works well as a Jell-O mold, too. Guests will flock to this cake like bees to sweet honey! A cake like this is so pretty that frosting the top would practically be a sin, so either ice it in the middle, sandwich style, or simply dust the top of the cake with confectioners’ sugar and call it good!
Photo via Nordic Ware It’s nothing bundt a good time when you bake a cake in the form of a stadium! Decorate it with your team’s colors for game day, or even make a stadium rock show scene with this fun cake mold. You’ve heard of cookie sandwiches. But have you ever heard of a cake that looks like a sandwich? This whimsical cake is shaped like a slice of bread, so that it is easy to split and fill with a variety of flavors to make it look like sandwiches. You could shape fondant to resemble bacon and tomatoes and put them atop green frosting for a BLT look, or add orange or yellow tinted frosting to make your cake look like a grilled cheese. Of course, peanut butter icing and jelly makes for a classic look, too! Make the most massive and memorable cupcake ever with this giant cupcake cake pan! The two-part pan makes removal easy and assembly a snap, leaving you more time to figure out how you’ll decorate. A pretty coating of pink icing with sprinkles is a classic look, but you could also let your imagination go wild and cover with rosettes or unique piping, or cover the cap of the cupcake with fondant for a smooth, refined look.
Love is in the the oven when a cake has a heart in the middle! This fun effect is easily created by using a customized two-part cake pan with a unique recessed shape which allows for a heart-shaped filling. No matter what colors or flavors you choose, it’s bound to wow once it’s cut into and served. Raise the bar on all sorts of cakes by upgrading them from dome shaped to the entire sphere. This two-part pan allows you to create a perfect circle in cake--ideal for creating several types of sport balls, planets, or even a groovy disco ball! Speaking of birthday cakes, I made one last weekend. This particular cake was for a friend's son, who was having his eighth birthday. My friend's son is madly into LEGOs, and when he saw a building block cake on LEGO's website, he fell in love. My friend, who is a magnificent cook but doesn't bake, asked if I would try it. I went looking online for LEGO cake inspiration and discovered many, many cakes -- but a dearth of really practical directions.
There are zillions of LEGO cakes out there, with varying degrees of sophisticated decoration. Want a LEGO wedding cake in progress, complete with dump trucks and cranes carrying rolls of fondant? How about Indiana Jones LEGOs? A 300-pound Batman LEGO cake? I was after something simpler and yet authentic. The most common recipe was at the Betty Crocker website and it called for marshmallows, canned frosting, and boxed cake mix. Plus, it didn't look very much like real LEGO bricks. My two inspirations were these cakes: I could find very little info on the first cake, but the second cake was by a gifted amateur named Kevin. He very kindly emailed me the info on how he made his son's cake, but it required official LEGO cake molds. I didn't have the time to acquire those, so I was on my own. (But if I ever do this again, I'm following Kevin's method: he painted the building blocks with melted candy to give them that shiny plastic look. All I wanted was two LEGO bricks, made out of cake.
But I didn't want to just carve up a couple cakes and call it done. Proportion and dimensions are everything in LEGO engineering, and I wanted these cakes to be done right. How would I make sure the knobs were the right size, proportionally, to the height and width of the cake? How would I know if the cake was tall enough? So my husband (a real-life engineer) and I went searching for LEGO dimensions online (turns out they are easily available), did a little math, and presto - a proportional, anatomically correct LEGO cake was within reach. So, just in case you have a LEGO geek in your life, here are step-by-step instructions on constructing an anatomically correct, perfectly proportional LEGO block. As you'll see near the end, the actual finishing of this cake left quite a lot to be desired: fondant is not my strong point. We joked that it was a LEGO brick that had gone through the microwave (or maybe the dog's teeth) a few times. But it was a start, and if you're looking to make a similar cake, maybe you can finish it off better.