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

Product Review: Wilton Molds

Product Review: Wilton Molds

Have you seen these???  Wilton has some new cake decorating products out that are pretty nifty.  I was very interested in their new "Fondant & Gum Paste Molds" ($9.99 each): Baroque, Global, Fabric, and Nature.  Michaels is currently having a "buy 2 get the 3rd for free" sale on all their bakeware and cake decorating products.  Go ahead and dash out to the store.  I'll be here when you get back.  I really wanted the Baroque mold, but they were sold out!  I settled for the Global and Nature molds.

Global

Nature

demonstrated with Satin Ice fondant

This was a lot of fun!  These molds are really nice.  They appear to be made of a thick slab of silicon.  They are easy to clean and are very bendy.  Love the colors!  I dusted the cavities with powdered sugar using my pastry brush and tapped out any excess.

I use my little wooden roller to smoosh the fondant into the cavities.

I was able to roll the fondant with enough pressure that you can see the mold through the fondant, but it was still easy to remove.  The back of the box suggested using a foam pad to press the fondant, but I didn't feel like rummaging through my craft closet for it.  I gently pressed a wad of fondant into the cavity with my finger tips and then rolled from the center outward.

If the fondant didn't immediately pop out, I was able to coax it with my pastry brush and by bending the mold.  I didn't notice any wrinkles or imperfections from impressing the fondant into the mold.  I did have to be careful not to pull too much on the fondant so it wouldn't stretch.

There are a couple of downsides to these molds.  The cavities are pretty deep, so the resulting fondant accents seem to be thick.  If you're not into that, well, you're a bit out of luck.

The other problem is that these beautiful borders aren't very long.  You'll have to do this many times if you want to line a cake.

Other than that, I say run out and scoop these up!  I had a blast and can't wait for a good excuse to use them on a cake!

Wilton Silver Cake Platters

Wilton Silver Cake Platters

I just saw these at Michaels and bought the only round ones they had in stock.  These are the 12" scalloped, grease-proof "platters" intended for 10" cakes.  This 8-pack was $8.95, but I used my 50% coupon.  Has anyone used these before?

They look to be made of some sort of composite cardboard.  Like what puzzles are made of.

Unfortunately they are flimsier than I thought.  It didn't take much to bend it.  I'll have to put a foamcore board underneath if I wanted to use it for anything.

The look pretty enough though.  It will be a time saver not having to decorate a board with contact paper + wrapping paper + some other food-safe barrier to go in between.

Good Cook 24 Cupcake Pan and Carrier: Review

Good Cook's Bake-N-Take

24 Cupcake Pan and Carrier

UPDATE:  I've thrown the plastic portions of this carrier away.  A tiny piece broke off one of the locking hinges, rendering this carrier useless.  Oh well.  At least I have the cupcake pan still.

ORIGINAL POST:
I've been wanting a cupcake carrier for some time, and my baking hobby usually ends up with me packing my goodies and taking them to work for coworkers to enjoy.  Carrying and balancing 2 Pyrex baking dishes full of cuppies just isn't doing it for me.  I picked this up at my local HEB for $14.99, but Amazon.com has them for $19.99.  This is from Good Cook's line of Bake-N-Take products.  It features a carrying handle on the cover that locks on to both sides of the cupcake pan.  The pan holds 12 cuppies as well as a red insert that stands above the pan.

The baking pan itself did fine, nothing good or bad to even remark on.  It's sturdy and even with elongated ends for you to grab.

I baked snickerdoodle cuppies and iced them with Cake Love's IMBC.  With a 1M tip, you can get a pretty tall topping with the double swirl technique.  Unfortunately this means the tippy tops get squished when the whole thing is assembled.

When I put the top on, I noticed the area directly beneath the carrying handle was sunken in.  I removed it quickly before the two cuppies underneath were ruined.

The handle is soft and the whole thing is easy to carry.  I'm pretty confident my goodies will make it to the break room at my studio without any trouble.

All in all, it's not so bad.  I just have to know not to make the icing tall. And if I do, well, I still have those Pyrex baking dishes...

Handy Gourmet Batter Dispenser: Review

Handy Gourmet Batter Dispenser

Product Review

Making cupcakes are difficult for me.  I have bad wrists, so it's slightly painful for me to hold up my KitchenAid bowl and pour cake batter into 24 cupcake liners.  I've tried other methods for getting batter into cupcake pans, but have had rather messy results.  After thinking about it one night, it struck me that there must be some tool for pouring pancake batter at restaurants.  The internet told me that they are called "batter dispensers".  On amazon.com, I grabbed one for less than 10 bucks.

http://www.amazon.com/Handy-Gourmet-Pancake-Batter-Dispenser/dp/B000U6AXDI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1268973346&sr=8-1

This particular product is called the Handy Gourmet Pancake Batter Dispenser.  It's very shiny.  That pleases me.  There is a small hole at the bottom of the container that's blocked by a piece of plastic.  When you squeeze the handle, the plastic slides away and the batter is free to flow out.  The bottom of the dispenser has a built in holder so you can set the whole thing down on any flat surface.

 The dispenser holds approximately 4 cups of batter (regular box cake mixes are ~5 cups).  

After at batch of cuppies, I've concluded it has some pros and cons.  

FAILs:

• The container can't hold an entire batch of cake mix.  This requires a refill part-way through filling the cupcake pans.
• Leakage is inevitable.  I had several drops of batter escape through the supposedly closed hole soon after I poured the batter into the container.  After several squeezes, batter starts to get inside the bottom of the handle.

• The last bit of batter takes a long time to flow out of the dispenser.

FTWs:

• Pouring batter into the dispenser was easy.  It has a wide mouth with slanted sides at the top.
• The handle was easy to squeeze.
• Batter poured very quickly at first.  The first dozen cuppy liners were filled so fast, it was amazing.
• It was easy to pour a little batter at a time.  When I had filled most of my cuppies to about 2/3rds full, I went back and added some drops to those that could have used more batter.  
• I didn't drip while filling the cuppies!  No random batter drops on the tops of the pans that would get all burnt and I'd have to scrub off!!!

• The whole thing is easy to clean.  The batter rinsed off easily, and I just did some gentle wipes with a soapy sponge to clean the whole thing.

Conclusion: 

Well, for me, this is a great tool.  It's probably much easier for other people to utilize some other way (e.g. using an ice cream scope).  But at $10, really, it's pretty cool.  And some day I'm sure I'll have to make pancakes for a mess of people and will be thanking my lucky stars that I bought this.

Now that business is over, wanna see something funny?  The instructions had a few Engrish moments that made me laugh.

UPDATE (03/27/2010)

I still love this dispenser.  Last night I was able to fill cups with batter WHILE holding my 10 month old baby.  She got a little clingy and patiently watched me as I evenly filled my pans while sitting on my hip.  It may be a single-task tool, but I love it.