Disposable Paper Cake Pans

I had a bit of a quandary the other day when I needed to make cake for two back-to-back separate events - and neither of the events needed a whole cake. I offered to make a mini cake for a one-year-old's birthday party (for him to eat and mess up all by himself - his mom requested no chocolate) and I also wanted to have cake for the rest of the people at the party, and the other event the request was for white cake with chocolate frosting. I had the idea to make one big batch of doctored cake mix (added sour cream, an extra egg, instant pudding, a teaspoon of vanilla) and divide it up into separate kinds of cake.

I'll show you the birthday cake tomorrow, but the main point of this post is the disposable paper pan I used to make the small cake. I don't have a small cake pan (just the normal 8 and 9" sizes) but wanted the birthday cake to be bigger than a cupcake. In the way back of my baking cabinet I found a few of these 5" disposable pans meant for baking cakes and bread in and then being able to give them right in the pan. Or for bake sales, etc. I wanted to frost the sides of his birthday cake so didn't want to leave it in the paper pan, so after baking and cooling one 5" cake (I put about 2 cups of batter in the pan so it was pretty thick) I just peeled the paper off, split the cake in half and decorated like a normal layer cake. It was the perfect size - a miniature 2-layer cake.

I've never done this before and wanted to share in case you haven't either! I will definitely be making this size cake again - doing it this way let me have enough cake batter to make 12 cupcakes for the other event and the rest of the batter I made into small mini-cupcakes for the birthday party.