Portable and Delicious: 100 Healthy Muffin Tin Recipes for Every Meal (2024)

FAQs

What can you use instead of a muffin tin? ›

You can use alternative items such as ramekins, silicone baking cups, or even a regular baking sheet lined with parchment paper to bake muffins without a muffin tray.

One of the surprising uses for a muffin tin is freezing liquids like stock and sauces, stews and soups, and foods you've blended or pureed and want to store. A muffin tin cup commonly holds about 1/2 cup of liquid, which makes it useful for leftovers. Carefully pour the liquids into the muffin tin.

If you have cupcake liners, all you need to do is create stronger liners by stacking them on top of one another before placing them in a regular baking tray. If you don't have liners, you can make your own using square pieces of parchment paper and a cup.

Is There a Difference Between a Cupcake Pan and a Muffin Pan? What is this? Muffin pans and cupcake pans are exactly the same. However, in yet another difference between cupcakes and muffins, cupcakes always use liners and muffins are often baked without liners.

For this reason, a steel core coated with aluminum (AKA "aluminized steel") is a popular choice. There are also pans made entirely of silicone, which is completely nonstick and can go from oven to fridge or freezer. However, silicone can't conduct heat as well as metal. How do I clean a muffin pan?

You can opt either for a cooking spray (here's our favorite one for baking) or melted butter, applied with a pastry brush. You can always skip the greasing and use muffin liners, but they may prevent your baked goods from achieving an optimal golden brown crust along the sides.

The muffin tin's large cups are perfect for making supersize ice cubes filled with all kinds of flavor-enhancing ingredients. Pour some water in, and then add thinly sliced cucumber or citrus, berries, edible flowers or herbs, such as basil or mint.

Can I leave some of the muffin cups empty when baking in a muffin pan? "Can I leave some of the muffin cups empty when baking in a muffin pan, or should I fill the empty ones with water?" Your muffins will come out exactly the same whether the empty cups are filled with water or not.

Instead of immediately starting to cool, the hot pan will continue to cook the muffins, which might cause them to dry out. → Follow this tip: After removing the muffins from the oven, give them a couple minutes to cool off a little, and then remove them and transfer to a cooling rack.

Once your muffins are done, pull them out of the oven and let them cool in the pan 5-10 minutes before removing. Gluten-free muffins only have to sit for 2 minutes before being removed from the pan.

Why do you fill empty muffin tins with water? ›

If you've used all your batter but still have empty cups remaining in the tin, fill each empty cup with a few tablespoons of water. This will promote even baking, and can help keep the tin from warping as the muffins bake.

Preheating: Always place the muffin tins in a preheated oven. Preheating the oven will make the batter less dense and the heat will make the batter puff up to have a nice dome top. The oven temperature must be correctly set to ensure that the muffins are baked evenly from top to bottom.

A jumbo muffin pan is exactly what it sounds like: a big sister to the standard tin, making six oversized muffins instead of 12 regular ones. Each cup in a jumbo pan is roughly 2½ times the size of a basic muffin cup, which makes the tool significantly more flexible and versatile.

Did you know you could make a baking pan completely from aluminum foil? You can! The trick here is to first create an outline of the shape of the baking pan you need by folding foil to create the walls of the pan. You'll then need more foil to cover that outline with more foil to create the bottom of the pan.

I couldn't detect any difference in how the cupcakes baked; the results were identical to those baked in paper liners in height, shape, and color. If you've got foil liners in your cupboard, they'll work well.