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This article is part of Spring Bake, a collection of brand-new recipes and ideas that will keep you in cake, buns, and cookies until summer.
If any piece of cookware needs a PR team, it’s the muffin tin. Yes, the muffin tin has a very obvious, extremely straightforward use case in the kitchen, and it has elbowed its way into being a must-have item for fledgling bakers and pastry professionals alike. But beyond the moments that call for muffins and cupcakes—which, I gotta be honest, do not crack my personal top-five baked goods list—your muffin tin is likely to gather dust in your cabinet. If you, like me, find yourself shoving it farther and farther back into the dark storage depths due to nonuse, I suggest swapping it in for something bigger. A regular muffin tin might not be your thing; what you need instead is a jumbo pan.
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. Instagram-worthy buns, self-serve frozen chili, personal tarts, and yes, very big muffins can all be yours with the help of a specially sized pan.
Stunt your baking’s growth—in a good way!
Placing individual cinnamon rolls, filled buns, and other dough-based confections in a muffin tin before baking helps control and standardize the size and shape of your finished product; the buns will puff and lift but stay confined to the space available, so you’ll end up with a tidy, equal-size batch. Also, for all the crispy edge fans out there, this technique maximizes contact with the sides of the pan—every bun becomes a corner piece.
A jumbo muffin tin achieves this same uniformity and texture, just with a little more room to grow. Try it out with these braided cocoa morning buns or your favorite roll-and-cut sablés using this tip from cookie genius Dorie Greenspan—just be sure to punch out slightly larger rounds to account for the extra space in the jumbo pan. Or, use the bigger pan to make Yorkshire puddings or popovers without buying a specialized piece of cookware. The result will be picture-perfect baked goods every time.
Go (actually) single serving
In the early days of food blogging, it seemed like everyone had a recipe for single-serving treats or savory bites that they made using a muffin tin. Mini frittatas, tiny tarts, and baby meatloaves dominated the internet for one primary reason: They were very cute. But in my opinion, individual quiches and pot pies made in a muffin tin are more like two-bite snacks than single servings; the extra bit of space you get by making any of these recipes in a jumbo muffin pan instead goes a long way.
Pull out your jumbo tin to make mini mochi cakes or egg bread. Line the individual cups with puff pastry to blind-bake crust for personal vegetable tarts. Use them as a mold to make crispy tortilla shells to stuff with taco fillings and salsa. Or take inspiration from MofonGO, a Puerto Rican pop-up in Brooklyn that forms the fried and mashed plantains of its namesake dish into a cup shape before filling it with pork and sauce. With your jumbo muffin pan, you can follow suit, pressing your mash into each plastic- or parchment-lined cavity (or flip the pan over to use the convex side as a mold).
Smartly stock your freezer
Use your jumbo muffin pan as a meal-prep tool by freezing conveniently sized portions of pasta sauce, chili, stew, stock, caramelized onions, blanched and squeezed greens—anything you might want to use in smaller one-off quantities. Simply fill each cavity in your tin with whatever you want to keep this way, then transfer to the freezer until frozen through. At that point you can pop the pucks of pozole or pesto out of the pan and stick them together in a resealable bag or an airtight lidded container for easy storage and access when you need dinner in a hurry.
Okay, yes, make some big muffins and cupcakes
My high school cafeteria made the majority of its money selling giant, individually wrapped muffins from Costco—the kind of baked goods you need two hands to hold and three class periods to finish. I loved those things, and have been drawn to XXL baked goods ever since. But even if you don’t have big muffin-related nostalgia, there’s no reason not to bake some Big Boys every once in a while. I personally feel that a jumbo cupcake makes a much better personalized birthday treat than a regular cupcake, so for special occasions in particular, it’s a good idea to go large.
Your favorite muffin or cupcake recipe can easily be scaled to fit in a jumbo pan, but you’ll have to do some math. A recipe for regular muffins that makes an even dozen will yield about 4½ jumbo muffins; to make a full pan of six oversized muffins, you’ll need to multiply each ingredient by 1⅓. If you’d like to scale a muffin recipe from 12 standard guys to 12 jumbos, multiply each ingredient by 2⅔. Don’t forget to snag a set of jumbo silicone muffins liners before you begin, and use the visual cues in the recipe rather than the cook time—your muffins will likely need an extra five minutes in the oven.
