Wilton Ice Cream Cookie Bowl Pan, reviewed

If you prefer your ice cream served in a cone or waffle cone instead of a regular cup, the Wilton Ice Cream Cookie Bowl Pan might be the perfect addition to your bakeware collection. The unusual pan allows you to bake bowl-shaped cookies that act as an edible dish for serving ice cream. The pan has a half dozen fluted cavities, but it is used with these cavities facing down – which means that it looks to be upside down at first glance – and cookie dough is rolled out and draped over the tops of the forms to bake. The result is bowls with neatly fluted interiors that add texture and flavor to a scoop of your favorite flavor of ice cream.

The pan is easy to use, and each of the forms has a small ring around it that keeps dough from spreading too much, even if you roll your cookies out a bit too thin. The pan includes several recipes for cookie bowls that are easy to make and very tasty, though you could easily use just about any cutout cookie recipe. Cookies that bake up to be crispy are a better choice for bowls than cookies that bake up to be puffy and soft. I found it to be easy to use and the finished bowls looked (and tasted) fantastic. The only change I would make to this pan is to include a template of some kind for the size of cookie dough needed to fit the forms. The recipes on the packaging give estimates of sizes, but I didn’t have cookie cutters that were exactly the right size and found that I needed to guess a bit on the sizing. The bowls still turned out fine (if you can eyeball the size of a dough round used for pie crust, you can easily do this), but a more concrete guide of some kind would definitely have made the process a bit faster.

The pan is nonstick on both sides, so your bowls will slide off the pan easily when they have baked and cooled, and any little cakes you bake on the inside of the pan will release easily. Small cakes baked on the inside of the pan have a great shape and are a nice alternative to the usual muffin shape for single-serving cakes.  That versatility is a great feature of this pan, as it means you’ll have twice the opportunities to use it for baking projects.