Plenty of people buy a pair expecting to bin the baking paper for good. That doesn’t happen. What does happen is that the mats take over certain jobs completely, and the paper roll lasts a lot longer.

Baking paper is a single-use sheet. It cuts to any shape, it lines a cake tin, and you throw it away afterwards. A silicone baking mat is a reusable sheet of food-safe silicone that sits on your baking tray. You wash it and use it again for years.

The jobs I’d always use a mat for

Biscuits and cookies. This is the big one. Silicone grips the tray, so it doesn’t slide around while you’re piping or spooning dough, and it doesn’t curl up at the corners the way a fresh roll of paper does. The biscuits lift off cleanly.

Sticky stuff. Roasted veg with a honey glaze, cheese crisps, brittle, anything with caramelised sugar. Paper can weld itself to that. A mat lets go.

Rolling out. A mat on the worktop gives you a clean, non-stick surface for small batches of pastry. Less flour, less scraping.

Waste. If you bake every week, a roll of paper goes quickly. A mat doesn’t run out.

The jobs paper still does better

Lining round or loaf tins. A mat is a flat rectangle, and it won’t fold into a tin. Paper also wins for anything you want to lift out whole, like a tray of brownies, and for really high-heat jobs, because silicone mats have a temperature limit and some recipes go above it.

Mats need a bit of care, too. Don’t cut on them, because a knife will go straight through. If you roast with a lot of oil, they can feel slightly greasy after a while until you give them a proper wash in hot soapy water.

I wouldn’t spend much on your first mat. The Amazon Basics silicone baking mat 2-pack is the one I’d try first. It has well over a hundred thousand ratings on Amazon, which is about as tested as a kitchen product gets. Each mat is 16.5 x 11.6 inches, they’re oven-safe up to 480°F (about 250°C), and they go in the dishwasher. Two things from the listing are worth knowing: always put the mat on a tray, never straight on the oven rack, and don’t expect it to replace the paper in your cake tins.

Get the pair, keep a roll of baking paper in the drawer anyway, and use whichever suits the job.