Silicups Silicone Baking Cups, reviewed

Silicups Silicone Baking Cups are just what they sound like: baking cups/cupcake wrappers/muffin wrappers that are made of silicone. They look just like the “real thing” down to the little ribs on the side of the cup. They’re offered as an alternative to the traditional paper wrappers on the grounds that they are nonstick and reusable, and because they can stand on their own, there is no need to use a muffin tin when you have a sheet pan around. I happen to have a set and baked up a batch of muffins in half silicone and half paper to see what the results where, and whether the Silicups offered equal or better performance.

The short answer is that, yes, they work just as well as the paper wrappers. The muffins cooked evenly and took the same amount of time in the oven.

The longer story is that there are a few little drawbacks to using these things. First, they are hard to clean and even though they are dishwasher safe, they might move around in there and need to be washed by hand anyway. Second, they don’t come with directions. This might not seem like a problem, but silicone, unlike paper, doesn’t breathe and it was difficult to tell whether the muffins should be cooled inside the pan or out of it. The muffins cooled outside of the cups became very slightly dry at the edges; those cooled inside the cups were slightly gummy, but became firmer as they were exposed to the air. Regular muffin wrappers are just so much more self-explanatory, and do a good job of keeping the muffins moist until they’re going to be eaten. Finally, if you want to make cupcakes, it is much easier to handle and frost the cakes if there is a wrapper on the cupcake (the silicone needs to be removed before serving unless you want to risk losing them when they are set randomly around the room after serving).

As a matter of personal opinion that has nothing to do with the performance of the cups, I don’t really care for the look of the muffin when it comes out of the silicone with ribs all over the sides. They look a little naked to me.

So, the cups perform just as promised, but because they need to be washed they don’t really deliver on the “no fuss” that is also promised. I’m sticking to paper cups for the majority of my muffin and cupcake baking. I prefer silicone when it comes in shapes that aren’t available in traditional bakeware, or when I really need a certain level of flexibility (unmolding homemade marshmallows, using a cake pan as a jello mold, etc), not as a stand-in for an already easy-to-use product like paper muffin cups. That said, I’ll keep using the set I have on occasion and if you think that you’d prefer reusable cups, you won’t be missing anything in your finished muffin or cupcake. Except the wrapper, of course.