Cake catastrophe, and a scientific experiment

Granted, a cake catastrophe is not to be classified with real catastrophes, like we read every day in the news. I do have that much of a connection to the real world.
BUT, remember this?

I had high hopes a couple of weeks ago when I first blogged about these pans. Fantasies of dozens of teensy-tiny cakes, and cheese balls, and whatever were going to decorate my future public food-sharing events like birthdays and potlucks.
Today, I had the time to try it out. I pulled out a trusted, if bland, sour cream chocolate cake recipe and mixed it up.
It's been a long week at work, and my brainpower is ebbing, but I still had enough engineer in me to say that I should at least experiment with greasing or not greasing the pans.
So I melted some butter and scientifically greased some cups, but not all.
Then I carefully poured in the batter, placed the pans on a baking sheet, and slid it into the oven, using direct heat instead of convection. I was taking no chances, baby.
This is what I got. For cake, it's quite the catastrophe.

Nothing came off. Not a single teensy-tiny gugelhupf came out. There was a slight indication that the greased cups were a little better, but still shredded the cake. Now I've got a big ol' mess that I have to clean up, no cake, and I even ran out of flour and sugar.
There was still a little batter left over, so I decided to give it another try. But only after a scientific assessment as to what went wrong, and what should I try to see if it could ever work.
In the internets I observed that MANY MANY people have problems with silicone pans, but nowhere did I find a solution. What did I know so far?

• I had overfilled the pans
• Melted butter certainly didn't seem to work
• It wasn't the batter, because the batter that overflowed onto the baking sheet peeled right off
• Heating the outside of the pans was part of the reason the cake fell apart - no crust

The best hint the internet gave me was to try putting the pan on a rack instead of a baking sheet. At the same time I chose to use convection instead of direct heat, because that would also help form a crust. Also, there was no harm in using the old technique of cold buttering the pan and dusting with flour.
So, new clean pan. Butter, flour, shake out excess. Fill cups only halfway. Place on rack and put in convection oven for 22 minutes at 150C.

Here the result. Highly satisfactory.
Sadly, the cake doesn't taste any better than before. At least science has once again proven itself.  No catastrophe after all.