The best muffin tins are easy to use and make beautiful muffins and cupcakes. Our top pick is the USA Pan 12-Cup Muffin Pan. It’s relatively inexpensive and has broad edges that are roomy enough to grab while wearing oven mitts. Muffins released easily and were golden brown with an attractive round shape.
If you want to make muffins or cupcakes, you’re going to need a muffin tin. There’s simply no other way to produce lofty blueberry muffins with crispy, craggy edges or tall cupcakes with smooth, rounded tops. But you shouldn’t stop there. A muffin tin can be a stand-in for a popover pan, facilitate making baked doughnuts, or even enable cute, personal-size breakfast buttercups. Whether you’re baking with kids or tackling more ambitious baked goods, a muffin tin is essential in a well-rounded arsenal of baking equipment.
Muffins tins are, of course, great for muffins and cupcakes, but they’re also the perfect vessel for savory snacks like muffin tin frittatas.
What to Look for
- Spacious Edges: We’ve all been there. Wearing oven mitts, you reach into the oven to rotate a muffin tin and you accidentally poke the batter, denting the top and yielding an unsightly muffin. Our favorite muffin tins had plenty of space around the exterior, allowing us to grab the edges with mitts or side towels without disturbing the muffins themselves.
We preferred muffin tins with plenty of room along the edges to grab with mitts (left). With less spacious tins, we risked disturbing the muffins.
- Standard Well Size: There are no official dimensions or capacities for muffin tin wells, but we found that the majority were in a similar size range—about 2¾ inches in diameter and 1½ inches deep and a little less than a half-cup in volume. Most muffin recipes work best with muffin tins of this size, so you can count muffins being attractive and well proportioned. When we used tins with smaller wells, the tops of the muffins spread out and joined together, forming a giant muffin top that we had to gently cut apart.
- Nonstick Coating: A picture-perfect muffin is no good if you can’t get it out of the pan in one piece. Most of the tins in our lineup had nonstick coatings. We tested all of the pans without liners; with nonstick-coated pans, finished muffins released effortlessly and didn’t stick at all.
Nonstick coatings also led to significant performance differences. In the two pans that lacked coatings, muffin bottoms turned out pale and appeared underbaked, even once the tops had reached a nice level of browning. To investigate further, we photographed the pans using an infrared camera. We found that uncoated pans behave like mirrors, reflecting heat away, while the coatings on the nonstick pans diminish their reflectiveness, allowing them to absorb more infrared heat energy. That in turn led to better browning on the parts of the muffin that were in direct contact with the pan.
What to Avoid
- Cramped Edges: A few pans in our lineup had very little space between the wells and the edges of the pan. There was nothing to hold on to when getting the tins in and out of the oven, so it was difficult to avoid accidentally poking our oven mitt or the edge of a side towel into the batter.
- No Nonstick Coating: If you buy a muffin tin without a nonstick coating, you should always use liners. Even though we sprayed the tins with cooking spray, our baked goods stuck and were hard to remove in one piece. Pans without nonstick coatings also absorbed less heat and led to pale, underbaked muffin bottoms. Note: Using these pans with paper cupcake liners would create even less browning, as the paper blocks heat from conducting directly from the metal to the food.
The Tests
- Bake popovers
- Bake blueberry muffins
- Hand-wash each pan after every use
- Photograph pans of different materials with infrared camera
How We Rated
- Performance: We evaluated the quality and appearance of baked goods prepared in each pan.
- Ease of Use: We assessed how easy it was to bake with the pans and how easily baked goods were released from them.
- Cleanup: We evaluated how easy it was to clean the pans throughout testing.
