Fat Daddio’s Sno-Cake Pan

The standard pans that most of us have at home include sheet pans, round and square cake pans, rectangular baking dishes and muffin pans. These pans work for the majority of recipes, though specialty pans can come in handy when you really need to capture a specific shape in your baked goods. Fat Daddio’s Sno-Cake Pan has an unusual shape that can give you a lot of options for baking and decorating. The pan, also called a Hemisphere Pan, has six cavities that are about 3-inches in diameter and 1 1/2-inches deep. Unlike the cavities of a muffin pan, each of these is a round half circle. The pan is made of lightweight aluminum and does not have a nonstick coating, so you’ll need to make sure to grease and flour it before using to ensure that your cakes don’t stick.

The cakes can be used in a variety of ways: they can be glued together with frosting to form balls or placed on top of larger cakes for 3D decorations (googly eyes on top of a Halloween cake, for instance). They can also be treated as regular cupcakes with a lot of extra surface area for frosting, or filled with ice cream to create a mini bombe that will look elegant on a dessert plate. One of the best uses, however, is capturing the look of one of the most iconic snack cakes out there: Sno-Balls. I’ve made Homemade Sno-Ball Cupcakes many times using a muffin pan, and while the cakes taste delicious, they don’t have the same look as the storebought version and getting that look can take your homemade cakes to the next level.