Is it cheating to use a novelty cake pan?

Alright, I’ll lay it right out there: there’s nothing more satisfying for a cake decorator to create a shaped cake from nothing, piecing together bits and parts from sheet cakes, squares, and rounds.

You stand back to take a look at your masterpiece, and even amaze yourself that you made a cake that rivals the eighth wonder of the world. But… the more cakes you make, the more alluring those cute and easy novelty cake pans might seem.

Are you cheating by trying them? Do you become a disgrace to cake decorators everywhere? No! Give them a try!

There are at least a few great reasons to use novelty cake pans:
1. Easy as… cake! Just mix a cake, pour it into a greased and floured pan, bake, and decorate. No engineering or architectural talent required.
2. Using a novelty cake pan gives you a good opportunity to practice decorating using an icing bag. Because the cake comes out with slight markings to show the details, you’ve got a built-in guide to follow as you decorate.
3. You can find a novelty cake pan for almost any theme out there, including licensed characters, animals, teen themes, sports, holidays, and everything in between. My favorite source is…….
4. Novelty cake pans aren’t that expensive – especially if you plan to use it more than once. And with some of the pans, you can use the same pan to make more than one animal – for example, there’s a cute teddy bear pan you can use to make a frog cake.

The downside to buying a boatload of these pans is storage. They don’t exactly stack neatly! But there’s good news here, too. There’s a hot market for these pans, even used. So if you buy one and use it for a while, you may not have to store it forever – put it up on eBay, and it becomes more like you rented it!