When I was twelve years old, my elementary school friends came over at our house to have a slumber party to celebrate the end of final exams. Aside from the usual activities of truth or dare, pillow fight, and watching scary movies, we decided to bake a ready mix devil’s food cake that my mom keeps in the kitchen cabinet. The only other person in the house was my uncle who doesn’t know a thing about baking and where the baking utensils were. So we had to figure out everything ourselves.

The funny thing was that we couldn’t find my mom’s circular metal cake pan. What we found was small oval metal pans used for making the dessert called leche flan. We had no choice, so we poured the batter into the metal pans and filled it to the brim. Being newbies in baking, we had no idea of the thermal expansion concept. We noticed after 15 minutes of heating it into the oven that the batter was spilling at the sides of the pan.

Nevertheless, the mini cakes were still delicious even though it really looks ugly and deformed. We also had trouble taking it out of the pan since the cake stuck to the sides of the pan.

At present, I already mastered the art of baking and I now have an assortment of cake pans in different materials, shapes, and sizes– metal, glass, and silicone. I like the silicone best because it is non-stick and resistant to extreme temperature. But no matter what pan you use, as long as you bake it for people who are special to you, it almost always turns out delicious.