On a dessert table, little impresses more than height. Towering trifles, tiered pavlovas, looming cupcake stands, a croquembouche: Tall sweets are the stuff of tea party dreams and birthday fantasies. But to the average home baker, all that dazzle can be intimidating too. It can feel like anything taller than a basic cake is out of your league. According to cook and writer Odette Williams, however, one kitchen tool can provide all the benefit of height without any extra effort. The key “to feeling like a cake pro,” she says, “is a three-inch-tall pan. Everyone should buy one.”
Standard cake pans—your go-to eight- and nine-inch rounds—are two inches tall, which makes that the most common height for a homemade cake. But recipe developers and cookbook authors are increasingly calling specifically for slightly loftier pans, which can bump any recipe up from basic to visibly grand. In her book Baking at the 20th Century Cafe, pastry chef Michelle Polzine lists a 9-by-3-inch cake pan among her must-have baking tools; “the depth is especially important," she writes, because “with a shallower pan, your cake may overflow or dome dramatically.” Writer and baker Zoë François also mentions tall pans in the gear section of her latest title, Zoë Bakes Cakes, noting that they “have plenty of space for cake to rise and produce a beautiful shape.” BraveTart author and Serious Eats editor Stella Parks has long been driving the three-inch pan train, writing in 2017 that “not only will the extra depth benefit any cake, it makes the pan more versatile.”
One extra inch of height goes a long way.
Williams discovered the greatness of the three-inch-tall cake pan when writing her book Simple Cake. “It was one of those things that I never would have bought until I saw it,” she says. “But when I did, it was so cute, so darling”—her first was a 6-by-3-incher—“that I had this visceral feeling toward the cake pan.” Since then Williams has expanded her collection to include taller cake pans in the classic eight- and nine-inch sizes as well as a 10-by-3-inch number, plus she’s gifted a few tall boys to kitchen-savvy friends. “They just look better and more impressive,” she says. “The height of it can make ay home cook feel like a professional baker.”
What should you do with your tall cake pan? In short, everything you do with the regular-size pans—and then some. A taller pan protects your batter more in the oven due to its high sides, which keeps the top flat while cooking and the finished cake blonder and more moist. As such, it makes a great choice for any recipe that calls for a regular-height pan of the same diameter—you’re simply giving the cake more vertical space to breathe.
