I grew up with many little Scottish aunts - Aunt May, Aunt Nettie, Aunt Bessie, Aunt Maisie, to name a few - all of whom baked shortbread. I have an old shortbread recipe - I believe it belonged to my mother's mother - typewritten on an index card with handwritten notes on the margins. I used to use it when I made my own shortbread, but now I have the recipe memorized.
This lovely stoneware shortbread pan was a gift from my mother. It is pleasing to the senses, with a nice heft and simple beauty. It's exactly the kind of thing that's very hard to get rid of, evoking history as it does. Yet, I haven't used it in many years. It isn't really a family heirloom: perhaps it came from Crate & Barrell or Williams Sonoma, a corporate buyer's concept of the Platonic ideal of a shortbread pan. The shortbread I've made in it isn't quite right. It's a skosh too thin, a skosh too brown, a skosh too dry. The pattern is pretty, but I can't get the shortbread to come out of the pan intact.
I prefer a simple square glass baking pan, poking the uncooked dough with a fork to conduct air and heat, so that the shortbread comes out with that perfect combination of chewyness and crumbles. I imagine that my grandmother baked with such a pan, in her real Scotch kitchen.
I thought about hanging the shortbread pan on the wall, but wall-mounted pans aren't really my thing. I can imagine a lot of dust getting caught up in the pattern of the scotch thistle (which ye mauna tromple, lassie, as you would know if you grew up Scotch).
The cheesecake pan is a by-product of greed - or perhaps more accurately, the seductiveness of free stuff - combined with the stuff project itself, which has inspired some of my friends to get rid of really great stuff. Thanks, Joe, but given that I didn't bake with this cheesecake pan for Emma's graduation cake (as I had planned to do), it's pretty clear that I'll never use it.
Although both of these pans are intrinsically very nice, the problem is the size of my cupboard. I have one shelf for cake and loaf pans, and these two items push that shelf over the tipping point from organized to overcrowded, with the result that when I want to bake a cake, I run the risk of a clattering disaster as all the pans threaten to fall out of the cupboard. Hopefully my brother or sister will take these from me at family dinner tonight. Somehow, it's easier to get rid of good stuff if someone you know and love promises to give it a good home.
Wondering why I'm thinking about cake pans yet again? It's Rich's birthday today!
Happy birthday, sweetheart. I am baking your favorite old-fashioned yellow cake with chocolate frosting right now, in the same old Bake-King cake pans that I've always used, with the fantastic cutter to separate the cake from the pan.
May they last forever.
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