Silpat’s Newest Muffin Mold Makes Cupcake Liners Obsolete

Welcome to our new food series called Eat It Up, where we share the kitchen gadgets and foods that we can’t cook without.

Baking cupcakes or muffins is always laborious. You either have to be equipped with liners to fill in each well or you have to individually grease all 12 slots with plenty of butter if you don’t want to risk your precious batter sticking to all the sides. Cleanup’s also a drag. Is it just us, or are those bits of crusted-on batter impossible to remove?! If you can relate, then prepare to be as excited as we were about Silpat’s revolutionary product. For years, we’ve relied on the nonstick silicone Silpat sheets for our baking projects, and now the company has added a Classic Muffin Mold ($50) to its Perfect Baking collection. We leapt at the chance to try it before its exclusive Williams-Sonoma release on September 1, and let’s just say the mold exceeded our expectations.

The Muffin Mold’s just as bendy as the other Silpat mats, but the wells don’t collapse, even when filled with batter. For our experiment, we tried a gluten-free cake, since that can be one of the stickiest items to bake, even with cupcake liners. Though this mold can can fit snugly inside a standard, half-sheet muffin tin, we opted for baking our our muffins with just the mold, although we did place it on top of a cookie sheet since silicon molds can be a bit too wobbly when transferring in and out of the oven. (Plus, this helps with even cooking so the the wells don’t fall through the oven grates.)

We feared that the bake time would be altered when baked inside this mold, but there was no change. Once baked, our chocolate cupcakes rose just right and cooked evenly through. The Silpat does come out piping hot, so we waited a few minutes for it to cool before attempting to pop out the cupcakes. Using two hands, we inverted the wells one at a time to release the cakes, which came out in one piece, leaving zero crumbs behind. This is seriously such a better, cleaner process than trying to run a butter knife around the edges of a muffin tin and hoping to wedge the cakes without breaking the tops off. Let’s be honest: Nobody wins with that method.

We’ve tried other silicone cupcake liners before, but they fell short on their nonstick promise, with seemingly impossible-to-clean crumby gunk left behind even after one baking session. Silpat, which is made from a food-grade fiberglass mesh coated in silicone, results in *true* nonstick cooking every time. Cleanup is as simple as running a soapy sponge over the material to rid it of any oily residue. We can’t wait to try more recipes in our mold, including these lemon-elderflower cupcakes.

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(Photo via Brittany Griffin/Brit + Co)