When it comes to cake pans, the best long-term investment for serious bakers is deep, thick gauge solid aluminum pans. I’m not a big fan of springform pans.

Why I don’t like springform pans

• They are typically made of thin gauge, cheap metal.
• They do not conduct heat well so the result is often a too-dark or burnt outer crust.
• The clasps eventually loosen and rust.
• The outer ring is prone to warping or getting squashed.
• They aren’t watertight so for custard-based desserts like cheesecake or flan that have runny batters and/or require baking in a hot water bath, stuff leaks.

The advantages to solid, deep, aluminum pans

• The thick metal and high walls help buffer the heat so that cakes bake more evenly without developing as brown of a crust on the outside. 
• You can pour twice as much batter in a deep pan, yielding a nice sized cake using half of the oven space.
• If you are a bakery, you cut the number of pans that must be washed in half using this type of pan.
• This type of pan doubles as a mold to fill a layer cake, which yields excellent results.

Follow this link to read my tutorial about how to fill cakes. 

3″ deep pans are the best fit for home ovens. 4″ deep pans are better for bakeries that have the advantage of more oven space. I prefer Fat Daddio brand cake pans. They are seamless, high quality, and maintain well because of their strong lip.

Here is the link to the round pans on Amazon
Here is the link to the square pans on Amazon

Look for the drop down menu that allows you to the pick the exact dimensions of the pans you want as there are many sizes to choose from. Amazon carries all the sizes.

The Fat Daddio’s website also offers batter capacity charts for their round and square cake pans, in case you want to know how much batter should go into each sized pan (this would especially help with costing out a menu). Note that the dimensions of the pans on the batter capacity charts are listed within the pan codes. So for square pans, the code is PSQ-(width x width x height) and for round pans, the code is PRD-(width x height).

You can download my cake servings charts for 4″ deep cakes, both square and round, which are a helpful reference when planning a cake. Click on the photo below to access the cake servings charts:

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