Baking Isn’t Hard When You’ve Got a Library Card

Three years ago Megan Waugh started taking her family to Bristol Public Library in Bristol, Indiana. Before long, they fell into a routine: Her kids would pick out their books in the manga section while she waited by a cluster of tables the library set up for group discussions and meetings. Last December, while she was waiting for her daughter, Waugh noticed a shelf in the corner. Instead of the expected books, magazines, and newspapers libraries loan out, this shelf was lined with cake pans. There was a bundt pan and a skeleton pan, an Elmo pan, and a Christmas tree pan, all available with just the swipe of a library card.

Waugh works as a cook, and had lately been frustrated with the dietary restrictions she had to adopt for her health. “I used to love baking,” she says. “And then I went gluten free a couple of years ago and was actually very resentful of it.” Standing in front of the shelf of cake pans, she thought back to a recent gluten-free cake mix she bought at the grocery store. “If they can make a boxed mix that tastes good and is gluten free, there is no reason I can’t bake yummy things that don’t make me feel bad,” she thought. While she and her daughter rifled through the cake pans, she had an idea — she was going to bake her way through all 33 pans in Bristol Public Library’s cake pan collection.

Over the past few years, libraries across the country have expanded their collections to include cake pans. Many libraries loan cooking supplies such as standing blenders and air fryers too, but cake pans, which are both easy to store and high in demand, are one of the most common cooking items for libraries to loan, with some libraries’ collections swelling to upward of 200 individual pans.

It may seem incongruous for libraries to loan items that aren’t books or media, but the practice is actually in line with many public libraries’ missions of fostering learning. Giving their patrons access to physical materials like cake pans, along with written materials like cookbooks, helps libraries knock down many of the barriers patrons face when learning a new skill. While a commercial kitchen, or library, can justify the expense and storage of specialty cake pans, many home bakers can’t; a bundt cake pan can cost more than buying a pre-made bundt cake, forcing bakers to choose whether it is worth the money to buy an item they might only use a few times a year. “Libraries are about access to information, and different parts of the community being able to access those things and information equally,” says Brendan Lax, collection development librarian at Hillsboro Public Library, which boasts over 100 cake pans for loan. “We have a goal set around lifelong learning and supporting creativity.”

Since the 1920s, libraries have provided resources outside of books. According to Mark Robison, political science and peace studies librarian at the University of Notre Dame, and co-author of the book Audio Recorders to Zucchini Seeds: Building a Library of Things, the phenomenon began when libraries at teacher colleges started loaning out teaching materials, like curriculum plans and journals, to their students. As the programs rose in popularity in the 1940s and ’50s, these libraries started adding art supplies, science kits, and musical instruments to their collections for teachers to borrow and incorporate into their lesson plans. In the 1960s, with the passage of “Head Start,” many public libraries were able to receive federal funding to open “toy libraries,” where children and parents were able to access a collection of toys and games to loan in order to foster learning through play.

In the 1970s and ’80s, nonprofit groups began to open up tool libraries, which loaned out tools to community members in cities like Berkeley, California, and Columbus, Ohio, in order to help them access expensive equipment to revitalize their homes and communities. Many tool libraries have since been absorbed into public libraries, further solidifying the idea that libraries need not confine their collections to written materials. While these libraries laid the groundwork for lending out items other than books, public libraries that loan out a variety of items have really taken off in the past decade. “More recently it’s just exploded,” Robison says.

In 2015, the Sacramento Public Library opened its Library of Things, which Robison credits with bringing the concept to the mainstream. It loaned out items like camera equipment and cooking supplies, and proved to the public library community that delicate and complicated items could be loaned out using the same systems already in place for books. “It was such a big deal in library-land,” Robison says. “It was covered in local news and library publications, and everyone talked about it. It put a lot of energy behind the idea, and a lot of libraries wanted to copy those ideas.”

Thanks to the advent of the “sharing economy,” people are more receptive to borrowing items rather than purchasing them. Rent the Runway made borrowing luxury clothes commonplace, and furniture rental companies like Feather and Fernish have rebranded rental furniture as a sustainable and appealing alternative to ownership. “It’s a lot easier now to find people who want to share things together because of various sharing economy platforms and apps,” Robison says. “Libraries have tapped into that.” For home bakers who want to expand their repertoire without devoting money and space to cake pans they may only use once, libraries offer access to a diverse selection of cake pans for patrons to loan out, whether they are looking to make a specialty cake for a birthday party or to test out different shapes to figure out which pans they want to invest in.

Hillsboro Public Library in Hillsboro, Oregon, is one of the oft-cited examples of a successful Library of Things. It offers 900 different items for loan, not including books and media. Five years ago, when it first implemented its Library of Things, Hillsboro Public Library had 60 cake pans for loan, as a test to see if a large collection of non-book items would be feasible for the library and popular with patrons. “We were interested in seeing if a collection like that, that has to be cleaned and kept in good condition by patrons, would [work],” Lax says. It was a success.

The library now has an extensive collection of items, many of which Lax and his team show off on their YouTube account. It includes about 100 cake pans, which have been checked out over 6,000 times since the library first acquired them, mostly from donations. “We get way more cake pans [donated] than we could ever possibly circulate,” says Lax. They donate the cake pans they can’t use to the local Friends of the Library group, which sells them and donates the money back to the library, allowing it to buy the most popular and in-demand bakeware for its patrons.

While it’s becoming more common for libraries to loan out a variety of cooking and baking supplies, cake pan collections are consistently the most expansive. Carol Albano, the library director at Harborfields Public Library in Greenlawn, New York, was inspired to start loaning out cake pans after seeing a 2018 Facebook post from a neighboring library with its own new cake pan collection. “We started asking just staff and anybody who had any extra cake pans at home [for donations],” Albano said. “And before we knew it we had, like, two boxes of cake pans.”

Albano bought a few cake pans from Amazon to help round out the library’s collection, and now Harborfields Public Library patrons can choose from a list of 20 cake pans, including a “Bake’n Fill” pan, a teddy bear-shaped pan, and a Barbie brand pan. The most popular pans are those designed for a specific occasion or based on popular children’s characters. Albano says that the pans shaped like numbers are in high demand, not to be outshone by Elmo. “Very popular,” she said, pointing at a cake pan in the shape of the Sesame Street character’s face.

Not surprisingly, storage and sanitation are two of the largest concerns for libraries when acquiring a cake pan collection. Harborfields Public Library stores its cake pans on a shelf behind the circulation desk, where they are only accessible to a librarian. To choose a pan, patrons flip through a binder in the children’s section, where different notecards display the cake pans offered along with a barcode. Patrons bring the notecard to the circulation desk to check out the pan of their choice, which comes with instructions recommending patrons wash the pan before and after use.

Most libraries have introduced cake pans into their collections in the past few years, but North Liberty Community Library in North Liberty, Iowa, is one of the few public libraries that has had cake pans in circulation since the late 1980s. A local baker donated her extensive collection to the library when she retired, and the program took off from there. For the past 30 years, North Liberty has built its collection almost entirely from donations, and now has over 250 individual cake pans. In fact, according to Jennie Garner, library director of North Liberty Community Library, only two of the library’s cake pans were purchased by the library. It speaks to the local support for the library’s collection, she says.

“We have people who will drive quite far, from other communities, to get cake pans here,” she said. The cake pans are such an integral part of the library that when North Liberty Community Library was renovated in 2013, they built a separate alcove to store the cake pans, with specially made shelving. Each pan is engraved with a number, and fits in its own corresponding metal slip on the shelf. A catalogue of every cake pan by number hangs from the wall, so patrons can easily browse through the collection. “It’s a little loud,” Garner said with a laugh. The noise can be forgiven, though, because according to Garner, the collection directly plays into the library’s mission. “For us it’s about leveling the playing field, making sure that people have adequate access to information or needed things,” she says.

The cake pan collections can also motivating on their own. Last December at Bristol Public Library, Waugh checked out a mini bundt-cake pan and started baking again. She made gluten-free banana-split bundt cakes, which turned out to be so delicious, she typed up her recipe and donated a copy to the library for future patrons to use. Waugh made a few more cakes before life got in the way, but she says she isn’t disappointed that she might not be able to meet her goal. “It was sort of a serendipitous group of events that made me want to shift my mindset in relation to baking again,” she says.

Waugh found a new way to enjoy an old pastime, and this experience is exactly what Lax thinks libraries should be fostering. “A lot of times at the library, you can check out the book or the cookbook or something, or you can go on YouTube and watch a video on how to do something,” he says, “but the actual thing you need to do it, it was kind of the missing piece.”

Emma Grillo is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn.
Kevin VQ Dam is an Viet American illustrator and printmaker in Oakland, California.