Fun Fall Molds

For some reason I have more fall-themed molds than any other kind of baking mold. Maybe it's because fall is when I really start wanting to bake cozy things like breads and cakes. Regardless, I love molds and find that they're a really easy way to make your baking look ~fancy~ (even if it's not)!

Breads

Take for instance, this banana bread that I made recently. This was just your run-of-the-mill quarantine banana breads, but by putting it in this fancy pumpkin mold it suddenly looks like something out of a magazine. This mold is from Nordic Ware (though there are plenty of other places you can get something like it) and works great for breads like banana bread and pumpkin bread.

I forgot exactly which recipe I used for this particular banana bread, but I very much like this one from Rosanna Pansino and this one with chocolate chips from NY Times Cooking.

Muffins

Continuing with the fall theme, my mom rediscovered some Jack-O-Lantern muffin molds in our cabinet and made some pumpkin muffins with them. We've been trying to eat more fiber and these muffins were chocked full of fiber with oats, raisins, and flax seed.

I enjoyed my muffin with a mug of hot apple cider!

Cakes

Several years ago I was in charge of bringing a dessert to Thanksgiving dinner. What this really meant was I was in charge of bringing a pie. However, I wasn't jazzed about the idea of a pie; I was much more of a cake person.* So instead of baking a pie for Thanksgiving, I baked a spice cake instead!

To make it festive, I baked two cakes in bundt pans and then put them together with frosting to look like a pumpkin. I then made a glaze which I dyed orange and drizzled over the top to add to the pumpkin-like appearance. The final step was to take an ice cream cone, paint it with chocolate frosting, and set it in the middle as the "stem".

This cake, while non-traditional, ended up being a hit at Thanksgiving and was definitely the prettiest dessert on the table.

*I've since warmed up to pie, but I still think a good piece of cake is better than a good piece of pie

A word of caution...

My main tip for using molds is to GREASE them really well beforehand! I've learned this the hard way and sometimes I still fail to properly grease leading to disastrous results.

For example, this bundt cake I made this past summer:

My futile efforts to divorce it from the pan:

As you can see, this bundt cake did NOT want to come out of the pan! I did grease it beforehand, but clearly not well enough. When it came time to flip it out, it would not budge and I was left losing the outside layer and scooping out the interior onto a plate (losing a portion of it along the way).

To be clear, this cake still tasted AMAZING (the recipe is here if you'd like to make it, with or without the bundt pan). The cake just didn't look the best, a reminder to always super-grease the pan.

Have fun!