Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins in Silicone Muffin Cups
I don’t have a muffin pan because I don’t make muffins that often, and with a Manhattan apartment kitchen, storage is at a premium so every device in there needs to be used often or have multiple purposes (or just be easy to store). In the past few weeks I came across several muffin recipes that I would love to try out and during this time I was made aware of silicone muffin/cupcake baking cups that you just place on a baking sheet (which I have). They were $8, so I decided to pick them up and give a few muffin recipes a try.
There are few things I like more than bacon. Chocolate is one, and banana flavored things is another. For some reason, I’m not a huge fan of bananas, but I love banana flavored things. If you combine those two flavors in a muffin, you can bet I’ll be all over it. Last night, I gave them a try.
As you can see from the pics above they didn’t come out looking all that great, but boy did they taste incredible. The woman I marry will need to make these, and in fact, should bring samples to the interview.
Silicone Baking Cups
They’re flexible and easy to stack and store. They’re supposed to be non-stick, but as you can see from the pic above, they are stick (what exactly is the opposite of “non-stick”?), but to be fair, most of the parts that got stuck to the cups were melted chocolate chips which pretty much stick to anything (and are supper yummy!). They work quite well sitting on a baking sheet, and they have a fill line that you should not go over. If you hit the fill line, you will probably get a nice head (like the middle red one should have had), but if you go over, be prepared for the batter to spill over (middle green one, I’m looking at you). I will have to try with a dryer recipe to really test the non-stick claim, but I can see spraying each cup with a squirt of Pam prior to baking.
Cleaning them was OK. They claim to be dishwasher safe, and since I don’t have one, I can’t test that claim, but I also can see them falling through the dishwasher trays and I wonder if they would get clean that way. Because they are flexible, you have to hold them while you run the sponge over them, but you can also flip them inside out which make it easier to get at the melted chocolate chips.
Conclusion
I ate three muffins last night (I know, I know). The first one is the pic above, while the other two were eaten out of the cups with a spoon. I’m seriously contemplating having one for breakfast...it does have banana in it after all.
Muffins: 10/10
Silicon baking cups: 8/10 (need further use)
Hmm. Interesting. I actually like bananas and usually have one every day at approximately 4:00 before heading to the gym after work yet I don’t really enjoy banana flavoured foods like yogourt for instance - although I’d make an exception for banana bread. That said, I’ve been hesitant about buying any silicone bakeware. I guess because they’re so rubbery and flexible, I have a hard time believing that they’re safe to put in the oven but I see that you’ve used and consumed with no ill effects so I may give silicone a try afterall. Thanks for sharing. Your cooking adventures always amuse me. Btw, you should check out Flickr Food Porn.
Some of the reviews on Amazon for various silicone bakeware complain that they give off a “rubber” odor. I did not detect any odor (other than the wonderful banana), but this is the first silicone bakeware that I’ve tried. Everything that I’ve read about them say that they’re safe in the oven up to about 500 degrees.
Trust me, I’m quite familiar with the Flickr Food Porn group. Not only is it in the daily read folder of my RSS reader, many of it’s photos are in the Porn gallery on my iPhone.
