The Muffin Tin Hack For Easy Chocolate Dessert Bowls

There are few things more satisfying than an edible food container, whether it's an ice cream cone or a bread bowl. In fact, there are countless trends for molding unlikely ingredients into edible vessels. A case in point is the muffin tin hack for chocolate dessert bowls. As evidenced by the numerous shapes chocolate candies can take, chocolate is an easy ingredient to mold.

Muffin tins provide the perfect cast for individually-sized chocolate dessert bowls. The simple hack involves pouring melted, tempered chocolate over a muffin tin or liner, placing it in the freezer until the chocolate hardens, then removing the liner from the hardened chocolate. While some recipes use muffin tins with paper liners, silicone muffin tins are the best choice for a sturdy yet malleable mold that you can reuse time and time again. You can use silicone muffin tins or individual silicone liners that come in numerous shapes and sizes including hearts, stars, squares, and triangles.

This hack works with most kinds of chocolate or a blend of two or more types. You can either paint melted chocolate into the insides of the silicon muffin molds or invert the molds to create a dome over which you pour the melted chocolate. The silicone mold has better traction and flexibility than paper liners, making for a clean and easy removal from the hardened chocolate.

Chocolate dessert bowls offer a delicious edible vessel and a beautiful presentation to display any of your favorite sweet treats. Even before you decide what goes in your chocolate bowls, you can create unique multi-colored patterns using different types of chocolate. For example, a beautiful marbling or half-and-half pattern using separate pours of white and dark chocolate.

Because you're using muffin tins or liners, the most obvious filling for a chocolate dessert bowl would be a muffin or cupcake: After popping fresh muffins out of the silicone tins, you can then turn those tins into molds for your edible muffin liners. A dark chocolate muffin shell would taste delicious with an orange-cranberry muffin.

For a more creative and colorful filling, you can fill chocolate dessert bowls with fresh fruit, custards, and pastes. You could fill a milk chocolate bowl with a rainbow of sliced strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries over a lemon custard. A dark chocolate bowl filled with layers of peanut butter and banana pudding, and a sprinkle of crushed pretzels and peanuts, would be pretty great, too.

Chocolate dessert bowls would also make the ultimate ice cream bowls. You could fill each bowl with a different scoop of ice cream, sorbet, or gelato and reserve some melted chocolate to drizzle over each bowl before serving.