Cupcakes for Birthday Treats

Your Chocolate Priestess is married and today is her husband's birthday. To see how old he is, you have to read the entire article today.  To celebrate I've made cupcakes and I've used the Little Gems cupcake cups that I was sent to test by sunsella.  These are silicone cups in a rainbow variety of colors that you can see in this first photograph.  12 of these came in one little box that doesn't take up much cabinet space if you that is a concern in your kitchen.

I decided to try a recipe for Caramel Cupcakes but give it a chocolate twist by pairing it with milk chocolate frosting and little candy decorations.  I had to buy the decorative candies and the cake mix but I already had the frosting.  First off the recipe makes far more batter than is needed for 24 cupcakes so I ended up throwing some out and filling up the liners very full.  This provided a good comparison of the traditional versus silicone liners.  Look you can see that the traditional cupcake came out less even and less full because the batter flowed over onto the metal while in the silicone it merely kept rising because it had nothing to latch on to.

This is because these sunsella Little Gems stood up on their own very well. You can see the side by side pan versus silicone in this photo.  My mother once gave me a set of silicone cupcake liners that still required the traditional muffin tin to work or the silicone just spread out too much make weird shaped cupcakes or muffins. These Little Gems worked exactly as you'd want them to plus you can wash them and use them again and again. I advise washing them by hand for best performance.

I topped the cupcakes with milk chocolate frosting and a mini square of chocolate (milk chocolate caramels to be exact) except for two that I put his number candles on.  The left over cupcakes that didn't get chocolates, five of them, I'll just save up to send with my husband into his work tomorrow. I tried to lay out the cupcakes to look pretty for the party itself.  Eating these revealed that they need to have a bit of oil rubbed on their inner surface -- as is very common for silicone baking products but this is not printed anywhere on the box.  In fact if there is one downside to this product it is that there is a lack of directions.

These sunsella Little Gems worked really well, better than previous silicone cupcake holders that I've used in the past! You need to check these out, Sisters and Brothers, and if you use the link in the photo below and buy them, you'll be helping out The Chocolate Cult, too.



I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.