Valentine's Cupcakes

I absolutely HATE when people think they've gotten the best of me or think they are smarter or superior. I hate it even more when I'm bested by a stupid silicone cupcake tray.
I woke up at 6am and they were sitting there in my dishwasher mocking me, laughing at me in that quiet "isn't she stupid" way. I can hear them "She's a nice gal but not too bright. She can't even get her cupcakes out of us!"

Let me back up. Today PJ's class is having a Valentine's Day party at school being the Cupcake Queen that I am and loving Valentine's the way that I do I was asked to bring in cupcakes to class.

I decided it would be fun to use my heart shaped silicone molds. I've had some trouble with them hanging onto cakes in the past so I made sure to grease liberally this time around.

30 cute heart shaped cupcakes went into the oven and I waited.

This is a photo of the last two trays that I went a little berserk on slamming them against the counter hissing LET. THEM. GO!! GIVE. ME. MY. CUPCAKES. YOU. $%@#$%@(& TRAY!!!

I started all over and made traditional cupcakes in liners and went to bed.
This morning I got up and there they were, bright red and happy looking all clean in my dishwasher.
I was going to give them away. Get rid of them and chalk it up to a bad purchase. (Heaven forbid the issue might be with ME or MY baking)
Then I heard them laughing and I yanked them out of the dishwasher, slapped them down on the counter and had a heart to heart with them.
"Listen guys" I said.
"We shouldn't be fighting! We are on the same team! You guys don't want to wind up in the basement in a box with the broken Cuisinart and the steamer we don't use! Can't we try to work this out and work together?"

They sat quietly listening, deciding.

I remembered somewhere a long time ago I read about making brownies and dusting the pan with coco rather than flour after you greased them up.

I decided to try an experiment. 4 trays, 4 different ways of lubing them up. The first has spray on oil and coco powder. The second has just spray oil. The third has crisco and the fourth has butter.

Two are out and cooling. The others are still in the oven.

We will see if they decided to play nice this time around....

I'm updating this post to tell you that they seemed to really like the brownies I made in them and they came out really well!