The tale of the traveling pan
Maybe happiness didn’t have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. [...] Eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Getting to level seven in Dragon Master and knowing there were twenty more levels to go.
— Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
I’ve been thinking a lot about physical objects lately: how attached some of us get to our stuff, how others need hardly anything, and what these everyday objects mean to us.
Sometimes, it turns out, the most unassuming objects are the most magical.
Until recently, a chartreuse baking dish sat on the top shelf of my kitchen cabinet. Technically, it belongs to Kiki, but it hasn’t gone home since May. Instead, it’s exchanged hands and apartments over and over.
This is our traveling baking pan.
None of this was planned. There’s no pan rotation schedule or sign-up sheet. It just keeps showing up at the next potluck, movie night, or birthday party, holding some delicious dish someone made.
The pan has a humble origin story, which somehow feels appropriate here. Frederika, Kiki’s mom, found it at a thrift store. “Very common of her to find great things this way,” Kiki texted me.
To this day, I actually don’t know what size it is. Is it an 8x8? 9x9? No idea! But I do know I’ve baked a variety of recipes in it, and everything comes out great.
The pan made its way to Kiki’s San Francisco apartment and stayed there until one fateful night in May 2026. That night, she brought it to our friend group’s Studio Ghibli movie night series. (For anyone curious, the movie that night was Porco Rosso, and it left me with more questions than answers.) She’d brought the ingredients for a plum cake, assembled it on the spot in Will’s kitchen, and popped it into the oven.
Everyone loved the cake. Ethan S. was, as you can see above, overwhelmed. And as tends to happen with potlucks, especially ones where everyone arrives by bike, the pan stayed behind at Will’s.
That was five months ago. The pan has been on the move ever since and still hasn’t made it back to Kiki (and it may not for a while).
Will brought it to the next Ghibli night at my apartment (Pom Poko), filled with Martha Stewart’s peach and blueberry buckle.
It stayed with me, and I made lemon bars in it for a cyclocross race in Golden Gate Park. They never made it to the race. My friends and I descended on them the night before, after a few drinks at our favorite local bar (and just missing last call at the pizza shop down the road).
Shane took it home next to make a custard rhubarb cake for Darrian’s art shed craft night.
Then it landed at Nola’s, and she brought coffee cake to the pre-ride breakfast before the art shed installation. (Read Darrian’s post about the creepy art shed installation here: https://bikertrash.studio/2026/07/05/creepy-shed-art-gallery/. It has since moved to a top-secret location, but leave a comment on Dar’s site if you want to know where it is. Maybe you’ll get lucky and she’ll tell you.)
Most recently, I brought a blueberry crumble in it to Alexa’s tie-dye birthday party in the park.
And now, Alexa has it. Who knows what she’ll make next?
What makes our traveling pan so special?
I swear the pan has some magical ability to make any recipe work. But like the magical jeans in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, it’s not really about the object itself. It’s an ordinary thrift store find that picks up a little more meaning with every handoff. I could buy a brand-new pan tomorrow and it would never mean as much as this one. It wouldn’t have carried Kiki’s plum cake, or had my lemon bars carved out of it after a night at the bar, or shown up at the pre-ride breakfast before Darrian’s art shed installation.
When I moved back to San Francisco earlier this year, this group folded me in almost immediately. I met some of them for the first time after coming back. Now, we see each other at least weekly. Every time the pan shows up, it’s a promise of more hangouts, more laughter, and more shared pleasures to come.
So maybe Ann Brashares had it right.
Maybe happiness is just about stringing together life’s small pleasures and feeling grateful for each one as it comes.
Preferably the bite-sized kind, baked in a square (8x8? 9x9?) chartreuse pan.
P.S. We’re talking about other ways to document the traveling pan’s creations, maybe even in a little recipe book. As Kiki put it, her mom would love to know about the life of her pan. So Frederika, this one is for you. 💜