Light and Dark

• The problem is that dark surfaces are especially good at absorbing heat. This comes as no surprise to motorists in sunbelt states, who are painfully aware that black leather upholstery and hot summer days are a bad combination. For bakers, dark pans represent a similar challenge. Cookies baked in dark pans tend to become too dark on the bottom, cakes in dark pans become chewy and overbaked at the edges, and bread baked in dark loaf pans often becomes unpleasantly crusty.

Turning Down the Heat

• If you're attached to your dark pans and don't want to give them up, there are several ways to adapt to their overly efficient transfer of heat. One of the most direct ways to counter this effect is simply to reduce the heat of your oven. For quick-baking items such as cookies, reducing the heat by just 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit is often enough. For items such as cakes and breads, which bake for longer, it might be necessary to reduce your oven's heat by 25 to 30 degrees.

Shortening Baking Time

• An alternative strategy is to maintain the temperature that your recipe calls for, but shorten the baking time. This capitalizes on your bakeware's efficiency, rather than fighting it, and has the dual advantage of saving energy and enabling you to turn out more baked goods in a shorter time. This method works best for cookies, biscuits, muffins, cupcakes and other relatively small, quick-baking goods. It's less suitable for larger cakes and breads, which might not have time to bake fully before they brown. Reduce your baking time by 10 to 20 percent, initially, then adjust it further as needed until your baked goods come out golden and perfect.

Some Other Strategies

• Often, putting even the thinnest layer of insulation between your pan and the baked goods is enough to slow browning. Cookies baked on a sheet of parchment or aluminum foil, rather than directly on the pan itself, brown more slowly and are less prone to burning. Silicone baking mats have an even stronger effect, sometimes to the extent of leaving your cookies too pale. Another option is stacking two sheet pans together, leaving an insulating airspace in between. Cake pans and bread pans can be wrapped with insulating strips or a dampened towel to moderate the oven's heat and provide more even baking.