Silicone bakeware, one of modern cooking’s most innovative inventions, has been used in Europe since the 1980s. First plugged by Martha Stewart in the States, it’s made its way to many a home in the form of rubber mats, flexible candy moulds and cake pans and colourful, reusable cupcake liners. I tested a pack of these liners from The Simple Baker over the weekend using the Desert Island Chocolate Cake recipe from NellieBellie. The cupcake liners come in a multipack of 24 in pink, purple, blue, green, orange and yellow and are quite thin (I’m using my old Wilton liners in comparison- the Simple Baker ones are about half the thickness). Now there’s 2 advantages to this- silicon is tough but flexible and I’m not a fan of silicone because while sweet breads and muffins seem to do ok unmoulding, tender cakes can fall apart. The thinner liners did well unmoulding because they’re thin enough to flex inside out easily. The second advantage is cleanup- again, being able to easily turn the liners inside out made them much easier to clean than my Wilton set, which frankly I haven’t used in a good long while because I hated cleaning them.
Going with a Valentine theme, I pulled out the pink, purple and blue liners (no red?) and lined a non-stick 12-cup muffin tin the same way you’d use paper liners. Now, silicone has the advantage of being able to sit right on an oven rack but I wasn’t too sure I wanted to test this directly in my oven (which I like to clean even less than silicone cupcake liners…) because while the label states the liners can withstand up to 475F and my recipe called for the oven to be set to 375F, I have a tendency to fill too full and I didn’t need to bake the cake into the bottom of my oven. Sure enough, I overfilled but everything cooked up fine. Now, another advantage of silicone is that it stops cooking when it leaves the oven. If you’ve ever made cookies and they seem to be way too soft for the amount of time the recipe calls to bake for, you’ve witnessed this process. Batter or dough baked on a metal sheet or pan keeps cooking after being removed from the heat source so you may only need to bake those snickerdoodles for 8 minutes but allow them to ‘rest’ on the pan for 5 more minutes before transferring to a wire rack. During those five minutes they’ll keep on cooking to a firm consistency so you can move them without turning them into cookie crumbs. Silicone doesn’t do this so if you forget it in the oven for an extra minute or two your baked goods won’t turn into crispy critters when you remove them from the oven before transferring over.
I’m not sure if this is still the case with cupcake liners only because I did pop them into a metal muffin tin. When I removed the cupcakes I sat the whole tin on a wire rack and cooled for 5 minutes before removing the individual cakes to the rack. They were a little soft but did firm up a little (not a ton, they were easily removed from the liners but this was the first time I had used this recipe so it may have been fluffier than I was figuring on but there were no split cupcakes, a problem I had encountered with the stiffer Wilton cups.
I would recommend The Simple Baker silicone liners to anyone who makes cupcakes or muffins on a regular basis. They’re colourful, flexible and easy to clean. If you don’t bake too much as I don’t you’d want to go with paper liners- no reason to store cups you’re not going to use because that’s another advantage of silicone: it’s reusable and long-wearing. The recipe for Desert Island Chocolate Cake can be found [here].
For 24 cupcakes I cut the baking time to 20 min but you may need to increase that a couple of minutes depending on if you’re baking in a tin or not. I also used 1 1/2 c white sugar and 1/2 c brown. If you don’t use all of the batter you can freeze the remainder in a ziplock quart sized baggie, just make sure to bake a few minutes longer when thawed. As for the rest of the cups, they make excellent dividers for kids’ lunchboxes or bento boxes- just line em up and fill with tasty treats. I filled my rabbit bento with pistachios, fruit snacks and grape tomatoes.
The Simple Baker 24 Premium Silicone Baking Cups.
Product Details:
- SAFE & EASY TO USE! The Simple Baker Baking Cup set fits perfectly into existing cupcake baking pans or you can simply place them directly onto a baking pan. There is no need for using greasy cooking sprays or wasting paper wrappers – just place them on the tray and they are ready to go! Your baked good will remove easily from these BPA free silicone baking cups!
- MAKE BAKING FUN! The set comes with 6 vibrant colors – pink, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple – 4 cups of each color. These cups are heat resistant to 475°. Each cup measures 2-5/8 inch diameter x 1.25 inch tall and holds 2.5 fluid ounces.
- ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY! Our reusable silicone baking cups are BPA Free and made with eco-friendly silicone. You will no longer have to waste paper wrappers and you can save money as well!
- LIFETIME GUARANTEE! Rest easy with our 100% money back lifetime guarantee. If you aren’t satisfied in any way, contact us and we will refund your purchase price, no questions asked.
- EASY TO CLEAN! The 100% Pure food grade silicone is stain resistant and completely dishwasher safe! Cleaning is quick and easy!
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