Are butter cookie tins the best cake pans? We take them to a lab to find out | CBC News

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."

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."

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Journalist

Alex Kennedy is a digital reporter with CBC Newfoundland and Labrador based in Corner Brook. He previously worked with CBC N.L. in St. John's, and has a particular interest in stories about sports and interesting people.

With files from The St. John's Morning Show