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but springform pans come in a variety of sizes, including 3 and 4 inches for individual cakes.

Tube pan. Necessary for making an angel food cake. Look for one with feet that elevate the pan as the cake cools, allowing for air to circulate under the cake once you’ve overturned it.

Soufflé dish. Large (1½ to 2 quart) dishes will hold hot soufflés as well as a variety of frozen mousses and semifreddo desserts. Small ceramic ramekins (4-ounce, 6-ounce, and 8-ounce sizes) are necessary for making pot de crème, crème caramel, crème brûlée, and individual molten chocolate cakes and bread puddings.
Madeleine molds. You can bake madeleine batter in mini-muffin tins, but these traditional shell-shaped molds give these simple sponge-type cookies the optimum crust-to-cake ratio.

Flan and cake rings. Although professional bakers use cake rings (basically cake pans without bottoms) to bake cakes directly on parchmentlined baking sheets, home bakers will find them most useful for assembling neatly layered cakes. A cake ring will give shape to a cake layered with mousse, pastry cream, and ice cream, containing the fillings until they can set up in the refrigerator or freezer.

    Q What should I look for when shopping for baking sheets?
    A The best baking sheets, rimless or not, are made of heavy-duty aluminum, which conducts heat beautifully so that the bottoms of your cookies brown but don’t burn, and won’t warp over time the way flimsier pans will. It’s better to use parchment paper or a Silpat to render the surface of the sheet nonstick than to buy a baking sheet with a dark nonstick surface, because small items like cookies tend to overbrown on darker sheets. For the same reason, avoid French steel baking sheets if you are using them primarily for cookies. Of course, if you are using your baking sheets specifically for intense browning, such as roasting vegetables, then nonstick and French steel may be just right for you.
    Q Do I need both rimmed and rimless baking sheets?
    A If your kitchen activities are limited to baking cookies, then you will need only rimless sheets, which will allow you to slide cookies right from the sheet onto a wire rack for cooling, minimizing the chance that the hot, soft cookies will break during transfer. A rimless sheet also comes in handy for getting pizza or bread into the oven if you don’t own a pizza peel. Line the baking sheet with a piece of parchment paper, shape your pizza dough or bread dough on top of the parchment, and then slide the parchment from the sheet to a preheated baking stone as you would with a pizza peel.
Rimmed baking sheets, also called jelly-roll pans, are preferable to rimless ones for the many other times when it is important to keep your batter or whatever else you are placing on your sheet within the confines of the pan. This includes a jelly roll, of course, which is made by first spreading cake batter evenly across the bottom of the pan, before baking it, cooling it, spreading it with filling, and then rolling it up. Rimmed pans are also great for containing a mess, for example, when drizzling a cake with a glaze. Place your cake on top of a wire rack inside the pan. Your glaze will drip down the sides of the cake and onto the pan, not the counter.
    Q What effect will insulated baking sheets have on the way my cookies bake?
    A Cookies baked on insulated baking sheets, which have a cushion of air between two sheets of metal, are less likely to burn on the bottom. By the same token, they may not be as crisp and caramelized on their tops as you might like. Choosing insulation is a matter of what effect you are going for and, to some degree, personal preference. Cookies often take a minute or two longer to bake through on an insulated baking sheet, so if you are using one in a recipe that doesn’t specifically call for it, you may have to increase the baking time.
If you have two rimmed baking sheets, you can improvise an insulated sheet by nesting them one on