Product Review: Cupcake Carousel

Product Review: Cupcake Carousel

My very supportive family has lavished me with all kinds of cake toys for Christmas!  Expect several production reviews in my upcoming posts.  This one, however, was a spontaneous purchase from a run to the grocery store.

Stats:

• "Cupcake Carousel" by Fox Run
• holds 24 cupcakes
• 3 trays
• BPA-free, food-grade plastic
• available in red, pink, or brown
• ~$20 at HEB (my local grocery store chain)

I had been on the look-out for a new cupcake carrier since my old one broke.  I was excited about this one because it looked roomy inside, and my previous carrier always smooshed the tops of my cuppies.

The top of the carrier features a handle and 4 locking tabs.  I did notice one of the carriers in the store had one of the tabs ripped off, so we made sure mine was sturdy.

There are 3 removable trays inside, each can hold 8 cupcakes and features its own handle.

The trays can rotate around the center column.  The product tag seems to present this as a desirable feature, but I'm not sure why.

The trays sit on top of each other with their own hollow, center column.  That only gives about 2" of vertical clearance.  Hope your cupcakes don't need to be tall!

These cupcakes are sporting a melted cinnamon marshmallow topping, so they are not very tall at all.  Notice the problem?  Sure, my cupcakes are nice and secure.  These babies are not ever going to tip or slide.  In fact, it's too secure.  As soon as I inserted the cupcake, it sunk right down to the bottom and they were difficult to remove.  My family and I got pretty sticky trying to get them out.  Trying to not touch the icing was like playing the board game Operation.  The best way I found was to pry them out with a small offset spatula, but that's far from convenient.  Ideally there would be a small finger hole at the bottom of each cup so the can be slightly pushed upward from the bottom and easily grabbed from the top.

You know what doesn't work?  Trying to drill a 1/2" hole in the bottom with a power drill.  Luckily no one was hurt in the process, but I did manage to split my guinea pig cup in half.

Pros:

• convenient handles on carrier and all interior trays
• secures cupcakes for rough transport
• lightweight
• tall instead of wide
• trays can be individually removed and carried; they look nice enough to serve with
• can be used for transporting other things, I guess

Cons:

• a bit large and bulky ... the exterior could slim down; I really don't need the carrier to also look like a cupcake
• still not ideal for tall cupcakes
• difficult to remove cupcakes from the trays

Overall I'm disappointed with this carrier.  I'm afraid it will sit in my closet-of-old-hobbies until I'm desperate to travel with 24 cupcakes for an extended period of time.  I'll let you know if I figure out how to successfully make a hole at the bottoms of the cups.

UPDATE:
After doing some online research for this product, I've concluded that what I bought is a newer, improved model.  The images I see online for purchasing this product only have 2 latches for locking the lid.  Low score reviews said they had the lid accidentally come off during transport.

Here is another blogger's post on 10/25/2011 about this product, and it looks like she has the same one I have but in pink.
Heart, Soul & Flour: http://heartsoulflour.blogspot.com/2011/10/can-you-guess-what-this-is-for.html