Friday, February 21, 2014

Fudge Offload: Silicone Vs. Aluminum Pans

In December, I spotted a post about fudge in The Blog Promoter LinkedIn group called Mama's Fudge Recipe, by Emily Powell. Fudge! Had to visit the site, as I myself make EZ minimal-ingredients fudge, such as "A Convenient Fudge" and "4-ingredient Raspberry Chocolate Fudge". Minimal ingredients are meltable candy, marshmallows, and frosting.

Emily's recipe contrasted with my recipes for list of ingredients and process. One of her pan preparation instructions that caught my eye was her use of Pam and flour, typically for a dessert to be baked. I asked her about it. She confirmed that the flour was raw. I am adverse to eating or serving raw flour, and wondered about dusting with powdered sugar instead of flour.for something that didn't need baking.

For my latest batch of EZ fudge, I tried spray oil and powdered sugar for two kinds of pans—a silicon rubber pan (24 square cavities) and aluminum pan (12 round cavities). Each square holds 5 teaspoons of filling; Each round (cup shape) holds 4 teaspoons. Natch, if you use these pans for cakes or muffins, pour only about a rounded tablespoon of batter to allow for expansion during the baking process. Some baking pans info:
The pixstrip shows ingredients and pans, fudge mixture squeegeed into pans, ejected fudge pieces, and fudge pieces in paper liners in a box.

After I poured the fudge mixture into the prepared pans and cooling it in the refrigerator, I didn't get around to ejecting them until about four hours later. (Cooling time should have been about an hour or so.) The 3rd-panel pixstrip shows easy-out results with using the silicone pan, not so much with the aluminum pan. The plateful also shows nice shapes from the squares, but lots of misshapes and broken pieces from the rounds. Extraction from the silicone pan was not bad. I turned the pan upside down and pressed from the back. As for the aluminum pan, using the butter knife blade sometimes popped the shapes out ok, but most, not.

In the past, I've poured the fudge mixture into a spray-oiled 8 x 8 glass pan. After a couple of hours, I'd used a paring knife to cut it into 64 pieces. That task took some patience, as the mixture became dense. I'm not great at cutting consistent cubes, either.

I've concluded that using silicone pans for fudge—after prepping with spray oil and powdered sugar—provides good results. BTW, the fudge batch makes about 1 1/2 silicon pans worth (36 squares). The shapes fit very nicely into mini-cupcake paper liners for neatness, as the pixstrip shows in the last pixstrip panel.

Because the fudge squares fit so well in mini-cupcake papers, a future experiment will be baking mini-cupcakes in silicon pans that I prep with only spray oil instead of lining with papers, then seeing how well they fit each other after baking. I might need to underfill the squares with batter so the baked shapes don't bulge and fit the papers badly. (Typical mini-cupcake recipe calls for a rounded teaspoonful of batter.)

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