Product Review: Silicon Baking Cups

Hello,

I thought I would pop in to let you guys know that I am still here. This blog has been abandoned for so long (for a good reason), but I want to try to go back posting more often.

As some of you may know from the last post that I was pregnant and I gave birth to my precious daughter last August. Time has surely flown by since then. It wasn't easy for sure, there were tears, there were a lot of hospital visits, lack of sleeps, and everything else. Now that the baby is a bit older (she just turned 3 months), I am so lucky that she could sleep through the night (mostly), and she is such a good baby. But still, I feel like I need more time every day. I am enjoying being a stay-home mom, but I have to go back to work in three weeks and I am dreading leaving my baby alone :(.

Anyways, enough about that. Now let me tell you about this silicon baking cups.
I was contacted by the New York Baking Company representative a few weeks before my baby arrived to see if I wanted to review their silicon baking cups. I don't use silicon mold often but hey why not. It's a good opportunity to finally get my hands on them. I was going to do that before my due date, but we were in the middle of finalizing the purchase of our house, moving in a rush before baby arrived, and the coming of the baby earlier than predicted, it was a pretty stressful time for sure. Long story short, I didn't get to bake anything with it until recently.

I baked with it a few times already to make sure that my review is solid (this is my first time doing review), but I thought it would be best to do the review it using the recipe I make thousands of times to see what difference does it make.

One of the recipes I made was banana muffins. I can make this with my eyes closed probably, and it is so fast too. I used both silicon baking cups and the regular paper baking cups just to compare. There are pros and cons about this cups. The first impression when I opened it was that it was very flimsy, I wouldn't use it without a muffin tin, so, no pro in that area since it is the same as paper baking cups.
I filled both silicon and paper cups with the same amount of batter but the ones in the silicon cups don't rise as much as the ones in the paper cups, which I thought would make the cake denser. It also takes longer to bake (to brown) compared to the paper cups.
I baked another recipe before this and it didn't rise as much either. I thought it was the recipe's fault because it was a new one, but I guess it is the silicon cups

Then the true and final test, the tasting. I depend a lot of my hubby for this. He is real picky about what he eats. This banana muffin is one of the few things he would devour regularly, so he might be the best judge. I warned him that it might be denser since it doesn't rise as much. Lo and behold, he came back to me and said that, too bad that I said so many negative reviews about it because the muffins that were baked in it are so much more moist!!!!

These muffins are moist to begin with, but hearing that it is more moist, that's definitely the biggest pro toward these cups. The ones in the paper cups are dryer on the edges, which is expected since it is the outer part of the muffin and would be exposed the most to the heat. While the ones in the silicon cups baked evenly, no dry edges.

So here's the summary of my review:

Pros:
- Make the cake more moist!
- Very easy to unmold, just slide right off
- Great to have around since it is reuseable, especially when you are out of paper cups

Cons:
- Still needs a muffin pan since the material is thin
- The cake doesn't rise as much
- Takes a bit longer to bake

- Washing is a bit of a pain since there are a lot of ridges, compared to paper cups which you can just throw away.

Despite having more cons than pros, I would use this baking cups for my muffins from now on since my biggest and pickiest customer (read: my husband) loves the result much more. So that's definitely a win for the silicon cups.

Here's where you can find it at Amazon, along with my review.

On a different topic, I find myself baking quite a bit lately, mostly simple cake though. Since I am at home all day everyday, I need some kind of snack I could munch on. I did bake a couple entremets though, hopefully I could post that soon.