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It’s no secret that ever since the pandemic started, people have been turning to flour, sugar, and butter for comfort. But what are they doing with it? The people have tired of banana bread (at least, the Instagram posts have slowed), and the sourdough craze has cooled (I put my starter on hold until summer’s over—it’s too damn hot!). So have we moved on to layering, filling, frosting, and decorating layer cakes? Absolutely not. Okay, some people have. But they’re the outliers. Most of us are sticking to the simple things: single-layer cakes, brownies, bars.
Edd Kimber—food writer, baker, four-time cookbook author, and onetime Great British Bake Off winner—could not have anticipated that this would be the case when he started writing his new book, One Tin Bakes. But that just makes him the luckiest food writer of the season. Because One Tin Bakes is exactly what it sounds like: a book full of cookies, blondies, bars, coffee cakes, and cinnamon rolls that are all baked in a 9-by-13-inch pan.
Among the eye-catching things in this book are the peanut butter “brookies” (peanut butter cookie on the bottom, brownie on top), the giant Portuguese custard tart, and the chocolate-tahini babka buns. But what caught my eye first were the binder clips. They pop up on one of the first pages, securing parchment paper to one of the titular tins. It’s not the only place binder clips have been shown being used in baking—here’s an Instagram post by an obscure newspaper—so an amateur baker can be forgiven for wondering more about them. Are they oven safe? What’s the point, really?
For Kimber, the reason for the clips can be summed up in a simple observation: “Parchment doesn’t like to sit neatly.” When you have a thick batter, such as that brookie batter, it can be difficult to spread it onto a piece of parchment that just won’t sit still. Securing it in place with binder clips helps tame the paper and make the spreading go smoothly.
Likewise, once the tin is in the oven, the fan can be a liability for the parchment. (British cooks use their oven’s convection option much more regularly than American cooks.) While your cake is baking, the fan can blow the parchment right into it, where it becomes an unwelcome layer. It’s not cute. It’s also not an issue if the parchment is clipped.
There’s not really a clip technique—the clip is the full tip, as they say. (Editor’s note: Nobody says this.) But Kimber does have some thoughts about which clips to buy. “I like the smaller ones,” he says. “Big ones can be very tall and can get caught in the oven racks very easily.”
Avoid plastic-coated clips, of course—“they’ll melt in the oven.”
Wash your clips by hand.
And buy a bunch of them. “I lose them,” Kimber admits, so now “I have a little pot of them.”
Here are a few clips to put in a pot of your own:
