If you’ve been to a few kids’ birthday parties or more than a handful of bake sales in the past several years – or longer, as I remember first trying this in the 90s – you’ve probably seen cupcakes baked in ice cream cones. This is a really cute way to serve cupcakes, turning them into ice cream cone look-a-likes that are always a hit wherever they’re served. To make them, you usually try to prop up the ice cream cones into a traditional muffin tin and treat them as a kind of edible cupcake wrapper. This method can be pretty tricky – as anyone who has tried it can tell you – because it is very easy to tip those cones over and make a mess (or, at least, uneven cupcakes) before they’ve fully baked. Nifty’s Ice Cream Cone Cupcake Baking Rack is designed to streamline this process and make it a whole lot easier to bake cupcakes in ice cream cones. The oven-safe, non-stick rack holds up a dozen ice cream cones during baking, so you don’t have to worry about tipping them over as you adjust the pan or them falling thanks to having an uneven base. The rack isn’t going to get as much use as a standard muffin pan, of course, but these ice cream cupcakes get such a hugely positive reception at parties and get-togethers that having a rack like this will definitely have you baking them a lot more often!
Magnolia Bakery is one of the best known cupcake bakeries anywhere, thanks in part to a few mentions on the popular TV show Sex and the City a few years back. The real reason that Magnolia is so successful is not simply because they were mentioned on TV. The real reason is that their cupcakes. They keep things simple with cupcakes that aren’t too fancy, or over-the-top, and they do them very well.
Magnolia has several locations these days. They have the original shop in New York, one in Dubai, one in Chicago and another in Los Angeles. I happened to pass by the LA location recently and made a u-turn so that I could stop in for a cupcake break. I had a classic vanilla with vanilla buttercream, which is a flavor that they always have available, and a chocolate cupcake with caramel frosting. The vanilla was a good, fluffy vanilla cupcake and the buttercream toppping it was classic American. You can’t go wrong with this cupcake and there is a nice vanilla flavor to it.
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Cupcakes are as popular as ever and one of the reasons for that popularity is that their single serving sizes make them portable and easy to eat. There are many options for carriers that will tote one or two dozen cupcakes, but there are many fewer options that will allow you to tuck a single cupcake into your lunch without it getting squished inside of a paper bag. One of these options is the Cupcake to Go Cupcake Holder. This good looking cupcake holder has an almost jewel-like look to its spiraling plastic top, which mimics the frosting swirl of the cupcake that it holds. A silicone base keeps a firm grip on cupcakes thanks to small indentations that really do hold the cupcake in place during most normal transport. I doubt that the cupcake is going to be completely unscathed if you use the container to play a round of flag football (at the very least because the frosting might simply slide off the top!), but it is sturdy and will certainly stay sealed up tightly until you’re ready to eat.
The containers are sold individually, so they’re not a practical way to pack up a whole batch of cupcakes, but they definitely make it neater and easier to transport one from point a to point b and still have your cupcake looking as good as it did when you left the house.
I felt bad that I wasn’t impressed by the 150-lb cupcake that set the Guinness record for World’s Largest Cupcake. It may have been big for a cupcake, but it also didn’t look to be much bigger than some cakes I’ve seen (and smaller than others!). But the record has been broken with a cupcake that is a bit more impressive – nearly 10 times more impressive – than the original. GourmetGiftBaskets.com broke the record this past week with a 1,224-lb cupcake, unveiled in Detroit. The half-ton pastry was filled with a vanilla custard and was baked in a specially-designed pan, not make of smaller cakes stacked together. It was over 11-ft around and made with 200 lbs of flour, 200 lbs of sugar, 200 lbs of butter and 800 eggs (amongst other ingredients).
As impressive as this cupcake is, it’s worth noting that the company originally set out to bake a 7,000-lb cupcake. While live-blogging it’s progress on Twitter, that cupcake – also baking in a specially designed pan – “suffered catastrophic failure during the 40 hour baking process. Weight of cupcake rising crushed a major convection tube.” The project had to be scaled back at the last minute to meet their deadline and preserve the rest of their kitchen equipment.
Just last month, the Guinness World Record for Largest Cupcake was set in Minneapolis, Minnesota with a cupcake weighing 150-lbs. The cupcake, while large, was actually not as impressive as you might think. It stood just 12 inches tall and 24 inches wide. It also wasn’t eaten after the record was recorded, although that is usually traditional with record-setting foods, but was instead shipped out to a pig farm to become dinner. Less than a month after being set, the World’s Largest Cupcake record may be broken. The company GourmetGiftBaskets.com has set out to bake a truly gigantic cupcake and is Twittering it’s progress through an intense week-long baking process.
They are using a custom 600 gallon cupcake-shaped “pan” (pictured above, right) to bake a ridiculous amount of batter in a gigantic oven. Baking alone will take more than 40 hours! The finished cupcake, if all goes well, will be unveiled on Saturday and judged by Guinness officials. The expected finished weight of the cupcake, with filling and frosting, should be around 7,000-lbs and the cake will stand over 7-ft high. We’ll have to follow the liveblog of the baking until then, but since it needs a forklift to be moved anywhere, it should be a bit more impressive than it’s predecessor, to say the least.
