Are butter cookie tins the best cake pans? We take them to a lab to find out - CBC.ca

Alex Kennedy | CBC News | Posted: June 23, 2024 8:30 AM | Last Updated: 4 hours ago

Nan may have been doing it for years, but was she on to something?

Image | Butter tin cake illustration

Caption: Butter cookie tins have many uses in Newfoundland and Labrador homes already, and it turns out they're safe for another use — baking cakes. (Katie Rowe/CBC)

Butter cookie tins have many uses already — including serving sweet treats and storing sewing gear — in many Newfoundland and Labrador homes.

Now a chemistry professor at Memorial University has put the tin through the ringer of scientific tests and determined it's safe for another use — baking cakes.

The tests started when The St. John's Morning Show caught wind of stories of the tins being used as cake pans for years. The morning show crew were sceptical, but baked two cakes — one in a cookie tin and one in a regular cake pan — and sent them to surface scientist and chemistry professor Erika Merschrod.

"This question really caught our attention — really the whole department. This was a multigroup, interdisciplinary, multigenerational attempt," Merschrod told CBC News in May. No one in the department had even considered such a use, she said.

After putting the cake baked in a tin through a number of tests to determine whether it was safe to eat, Merschrod said she was genuinely surprised by the results.

"The cookie tin baked really well. All the things I thought could go wrong, it was a great cake," she said.

"[We] took a piece of this and put it in an instrument where it's basically like an oven, but it's sitting on a balance on a scale. So you can weigh the piece and see if it loses any mass. Because if it's losing mass, something's coming off. Nothing, nothing came off.… We looked at it under various types of microscopes, no change. Under spectroscopes, no change. We were amazed."

Image | Erika Merschrod 

Caption: Erika Merschrod, asurface scientist and chemical professor at Memorial University, says she was surprised by the results. (Submitted by Erika Merschrod)

Merschrod said she had concerns that the thin metal or paint on the tin would make the cake unsafe to eat but tests showed no major differences between the two cakes.

Tests were also done on the composition of the tin after it was baked, with the lid being used as a control group, Merschrod, but the tin held up great in the oven.

So what's Merschrod's message now that science has proven cookie tins make great cake pans?

Try it for yourself.

"These are robust, and I say I'm going to try it," she said with a laugh. "I'm going to try baking a cake in a tin, because it just seems so convenient."

Media | St John's Morning Show : Did our cookie tin cake pass the lab testing process?

Caption: A couple of weeks ago, we started a quest to answer the age-old question...can you safely bake cakes in a butter cookie tin? Surface scientist and professor Erika Merschrod stopped by this morning with the results.

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2024-06-23 08:34:11Z
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