Cupcake Removal Trick plus bonus

How many of us have problems saying "no"? Pick me! Pick me! 

I wish I would have figured out the tricks I just learned this morning when I was baking 250 cupcakes for a Girl Scout event. Yeah... 250 cupcakes... iced... all cute like. Do the math, people. That's 11 cake mixes!

My problem is was that I have 5 pans for cupcakes (remember, 11 mixes and that means 22 pans). I have 4 twelve cupcake holder pans and 2 six cupcake holder pans. When cupcakes come out of the oven, they are hot little buggars and I needed to go again. I'm not a patient baker. When you try to grab those little suckers out of the pans, you burn your fingers. Yes, you could use a hot pad, but then you tear up the cupcake. You can try to pinch on the sides, but then you know you are going to loosen the liner off the cake. Cupcakes are delicate! Especially when you want them out of the blasted pan for the next round of batter. 

This morning, I was baking some cupcakes and thought "hmmmm... I wonder...." I have cooling racks that I use to flip sheetcakes out of pans. you put a cooling rack over top of the pan, flip, and voila. Sheetcake on cooling rack. So, I took TWO cooling racks, because I didn't want cupcakes on the loose or all over the floor. I sandwiched the cupcake pan between 2 cooling racks. This gave me a fairly good sturdy sandwich to build my confidence for the next step. Picture this: right side up cooling rack, cupcake pan, upside down rock. And.... FLIP! 12 upside down cupcakes. Wait, upside down... hmmm... probably not good to leave them like that. So I put the 2nd rack over the top of my cupcake bottoms and flipped again. 12 right side up cupcakes all cute on a cooling rack. No burnt fingers. No loose liners. No torn up cupcakes.

If you do this while the cupcakes are hot, there may be a few lines from the rack, but they bounce back and you are going to ice them. Right? Icing is good... don't forget the icing!

I was telling my friend about this and she thinks I'm a genius. I do feel like one right now, but I'm sure others out there have done this for years and I'm just late to the game. Now, of course, if you overfill cupcake liners and cupcake is stuck to the pan this isn't going to work as well... so, don't do that. 

In addition to this trick, next time I'm making 250 cupcakes I'm going to get myself a little gummy finger thimble like bank tellers use to count money. Uh huh... cupcake liners beware. I'm on to your game of never separating correctly. I have plans for you, too. Me and my little gummy finger are out to show you who is boss.

Of course, this really has nothing to do with Girl Scouts... unless you are making 250 cupcakes and are thinking "HOW am I going to get these stupid things out of the pan without burning my fingers off, loosening the liners, and tearing up cupcakes?!?" If that is your problem, then hopefully this helps. :)

They also look super cute sitting on the rack in their perfect cupcake pan spacing.