Any cake can be served with tea, but teacakes are usually small, delicate cakes that could be part of an afternoon tea service. Nordic Ware’s Teacake Pan is designed to make these tiny cakes look as good as possible. The heavy duty pan has 30 cavities, each about the size of a miniature muffin cavity. What makes this pan interesting is the amount of detail that is in each of those cavities, which makes every teacake look like a elaborate miniature bundt cake. There are ten different designs in the pan, including classic bundt shapes, a hearts, stars, roses and other flowers. The pan makes it easy to make a very elegant dessert plate at a party or special event, and you can use the pan with just about any cake or brownie recipe. The finished cakes can be served plain or glazed with a thin coat of icing that will still show off their beautiful shapes.
It is important to prep your pan carefully when working with a pan like this one to ensure that your cakes come out cleanly and that you get as much detail as possible in the finished products, and the pan has so much detail that this can be tricky. The pan has a nonstick finish, but greasing the pan carefully using melted butter or shortening and spreading it in with a pastry brush will give you a more reliable release than simply spraying the pan with nonstick spray before you bake.
There is nothing like getting a bouquet of roses to say “I Love You” – but a rose-shaped cake comes pretty close, and might even be better than flowers if the cake happens to be your favorite flavor! This is clearly what they were thinking at Nordic Ware when they designed their Rose Bundt Pan. The beautiful cast aluminum pan looks like a giant rose in bloom, with row upon row of lovely petals coming from the center of the pan. The 10-inch bundt pan comes with a recipe, but is a standard size and should work with any favorite bundt recipe that you already have. A nonstick finish on the inside of the pan will help cakes to come out easily, with all that detail intact. One of the great things about a pan like this one is that it creates a very dramatic cake and you don’t need to do any decorating to get it to look great. Just sprinkle the cake with a little confectioners’ sugar or a little cocoa powder and it is ready to serve.
When you have a pan with this much detail, you always run the risk of the cake cake sticking in places, even when the pan has a nonstick coating. To ensure that you get a clean release, you need to be even more diligent about greasing and flouring this pan than you do with other bundt designs. I recommend melting some shortening (or just using vegetable oil) in a small bowl and using a pastry brush to give the inside of the pan a good coat before dusting it with a little bit of flour. Also, let the cake rest and retract in the pan for about 10-15 minutes after baking and that will help it slide out a little bit more easily, too.
It’s fun to top cupcakes with big swirls of frosting, but there are many times when you might want your baked goods to get a little more detail in their decorating. Piping small details or decorations onto cake with colored frosting can be a challenge, since pastry bags don’t always make it easy to get the fine level of detail that you might need – especially if you’re more of a casual cake decorator, as opposed to someone who does this all the time.
Fortunately, Nordic Ware’s EZ Deco Icing Pen seems designed to solve just this problem. The pen holds a small piping bag and allows you to pipe out frosting with the same level of control you would get with a regular pen. The tool has a compartment to hold the piping bag and you simply press a small lever as you work to control the flow of the frosting. It’s comfortable to hold, which means that you won’t tire your fingers out as you might with a traditional pastry bag, even if you’re working on a big cake or batch of cookies. It works both with stiff and slightly softer icings, and it is easy to change the pastry bag out so that you can work with different colors. The pen also comes with several different tips, so that you can get different textures in your details, too.
Gingerbread men (or gingerbread women) are staples of the holiday baking season, right up there with classic sugar cookies as a treat that most bakers love to make. Gingerbread cakes are also popular around the holidays, although they don’t usually get decorated to the extent that smaller gingerbread cookies do. Nordic Ware’s seasonal Gingerbread Man Pan puts a little more fun into gingerbread cake with a pan that is shaped like a giant gingerbread man.
The cast aluminum pan has a classic gingerbread man shape, complete with a face, buttons and cuffs that will transfer from the pan to whatever you’re baking in it. It has a nonstick finish, so cakes should slide out quite easily and still keep their shape. The details on the face are clear enough that they won’t get lost during baking. You get a lot of personality from a pan like this – after all, its shape is instantly recognizable even if the smell of molasses and spices doesn’t drift out of it while looking at a picture online – so while it doesn’t necessarily have to be decorated, it is a lot more fun if you use a little bit of icing to dress the big man up as you would some of his smaller counterparts and give his face a little more expression before putting him on the holiday dessert table.
The holiday season is the best time of year for doing a little extra decoration when you’re baking. Everyone is in a festive mood and it starts to seem like every dessert can use a little extra something special. Cake pops are often decorated, no matter what season they’re made during, but this cute Snowman Cake Pop Pan will give them even more holiday character. The cake pop pan is a two-part pan that snaps together after cake batter is added to the snowman-shaped cavities on one side. During baking the cake rises up to fill the top half of the mold, leaving you with a tiny snowman-shaped cake. You can also use the pan to simply mold the cake+cake frosting variety of cake pops, although it very nice to be able to bake lighter all-cake pops in a pan like this one. The finished pops can be dipped in chocolate or in a candy coating and decorated to dress them up even more.
