Baking Cup Comparison

If you’re like me, you get excited when you see a super cute baking cup! I have polka dots, paisleys, zebra print, striped, colored foil, and even though I have stacks and stacks of baking cups, if a cute pattern or color catches my eye, I simply must have it.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s an addiction, but you could call it a habit.  Luckily it isn’t a very expensive habit to have, but with baking cups ranging from $2 to $7 a package, it can add up.  One thing that has driven me crazy about baking cups is when the following happens – You have the cutest most lovely baking cup that is going to be the perfect party accent and ties in with everything beautifully and you know it will just make your cupcake pop, you put the baking cups in the pan, fill them with batter, bake, and when you pull the cupcakes out of the pan you find that your super cute baking cup is completely unrecognizable.  You can no longer discern the original color, or pattern, and all of the colors are muted and confused!  Disaster!  Have you ever had this happen to you?  What is the point of having fabulous baking cups if the process of baking the cupcakes ruins them!  I promise to get to the bottom of this problem once and for all!

There is a baking cup line out on the market now called ColorCups.  This line is manufactured by Wilton and guarantees that colors will remain bright on the outside even after baking.  The slogan on the package describes ColorCups as “Always bright, colorful, and fun!” I decided I would put these supposedly super powered baking cups to the test! I decided to test them against a regular baking cup and see what the results were.

Taking a look at the inside of the ColorCup baking cup, you can see that it is actually foil. Of course a foil lined baking cup!  The foil makes a barrier between the grease and oil from the cupcake protecting the pretty outside liner! Brilliant!  Once I saw this, I had high hopes for these new baking cups.  The baking cup on the right is just a standard no frills baking cup.  Because I already knew that the standard plain baking cup would probably not fare well against this new hybrid ColorCup baking cup, I decided to throw a third cupcake liner into the mix.  I used a standard polka dot baking cup lined with a Reynolds foil baking cup.  I wanted to see if I could make a DIY ColorCup by adding a foil liner to any old baking cup.

I baked all of the cupcakes at the same time, in the same pan, with the same batter so that there would be no other variables.

I intentionally used baking cups with white backgrounds since the bleed through shows up best on baking cups with light backgrounds, and I know from previous experience that dark colored batters such as chocolate show through on a lot of baking cups, so I used chocolate for the “worst case scenario.”

From the moment I took the cupcakes out of the pan, the results were obvious.  There was a clear winner!  The Wilton ColorCup had prevailed!

The standard baking cup was the biggest loser!  The polka dots were completely lost and the brown from the chocolate of the cupcake became the prominent color.

The standard baking cup lined with the Reynolds foil baking cup came in second.  The polka dot baking cup was still vibrant and colorful with no grease seep through or color mutation, but the liner still pulled away from the cupcake since it was not actually attached to the foil liner.

You have to hand it to the Wilton ColorCup; it really is a revolutionary thing to be able to bake a cupcake and still have a perfectly bright and pretty liner!  One of the keys to the ColorCup design is that the foil lining is adhered to the pretty paper exterior liner.  While the standard baking cup lined with the Reynolds foil baking cup came in second, you could tell that the cupcake had two separate liners.  The space between the paper and the foil is visible making the overall cupcake just slightly less attractive.  In some scenarios, if you are going for a ruffled look, this could be preferable, but overall the ColorCup wins.

The answer to this baking cup problem that has plagued bakers endlessly has been solved! If you need a perfectly dressed cupcake, use a foil lined baking cup.  In addition to Wilton ColorCups, Reynolds has a similar line called Reynolds StayBrite baking cups.  Hopefully other baking cup manufacturers will follow suit so that we will have a wider array of designs to chose from.  In the meantime, I need to start stocking up on more baking cups!!!