Giant Cupcake Pan Review

Little did I know I would be doing a baking pan review.  Fun-Sized Chick is a big fan of the TV show Cupcake Wars.  I've gotten up on a Saturday morning and she's already had a batch of cupcakes in the oven.  Well, yesterday was her birthday and she wanted one of these big cupcake cakes.

Originally, I purchased a Nordic Ware pan from Walmart that held six cups of batter.  It looked kind of small to me so I checked the Wilton one that Michael's carries.  Theirs held ten cups of batter, so I used my coupon and bought it.  (It's still rather pricey, I think.  I told the girls we need to use it a lot to get our monies' worth.)  The one I bought didn't come with any directions, so I forged ahead creating my own learning curve.

I used this recipe (I put this in pdf format for you, again) which will make three 8-9" layers.  (Adapted from my Betty Crocker cookbook.)  I filled the pan 2/3-3/4 full and had enough batter for four extra regular-sized cupcakes.  You may be able to use a regular cake mix, but I didn't want to take the chance of having a skimpy cake, we wanted homemade, too.

Now for the Learning Curve portion:  I put batter in both halves and put it in the oven.  Wwweeellllll, the bottom holds more batter than the top, so when the top was done the bottom was still runny.  Oh.  Boy.  I knocked the top section out and the liquidy middle of the bottom came oozing out.  I baked it for a few more minutes, but it didn't recover.   It had a hole in the middle.  To "fix" it, I carved a spare cupcake and stuffed it in the hole.  It actually worked, so no harm was done.  After this snafu, I Googled the pan and found the suggestion on ehow to either put the batter in the bottom portion and bake for ten minutes before adding the batter for the top--no kidding--or, bake them at the same time longer on a lower temp, 60-70 min. at 325^o

Image from DessertStalking

Fun-Sized Chick was talking about using strawberries somehow, so I took the remaining bag we had in the freezer and made this sauce found on Yahoo Answers.  I would highly recommend the sauce, it was great!  We have enough left over to use with shortcake or waffles.

To assemble, I made standard butter cream frosting, tinted half yellow, and the remainder pink, to which I also added strawberry syrup.  I drizzled strawberry syrup on the bottom layer, then frosted.  We ate it with the strawberry sauce.  Although this sounds like a lot of work it really wasn't bad.  Even the strawberry sauce was simple.

This was wickedly delicious so I'll need to be super careful about eating healthy the rest of the week.  As a side note, I can bake, but my cake decorating skills leave something to be desired.  While my post is a review, I did not receive any compensation (darn!) for any of the products, but dear folks at Nordic Ware or Wilton, if you're reading this, feel free to forward any baking products you like!

Here's my "Cupcake Chick."  She's dressed like a hippie for a school event--hence the glasses and headband, posing with cupcakes, of course!

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