Last Sunday, we had a progressive dinner with the Frederick side of the family so that they could see our new house and Caleb & Amy’s new house, and also to celebrate Grandma Frederick’s birthday. We had some lovely appetizers and lasagna at the first stop, then had dessert at our place.  I really wanted to make pink & green desserts to match my kitchen, and one of the ones I decided to make was Bakerella’s cupcake bites.  You can find her tutorial here, but I am going to share my pictures and instructions below. 

You start by baking a cake, homemade or from scratch.  I had a box of vanilla cake mix that had been on the shelf for awhile so I made that.

Next, is an extremely fun part of the process: You mash up the cake.  I used a fork and spent a good five minutes going at it, until it was very fine.   

Now, grab a can of cream cheese frosting (or make your own) and incoroprate that into the crumbled cake, using the back of a spoon.  It will be a pretty sticky substance, that reminded me of cookie dough.     Then, roll the cake into 1 1/2 inch balls and set on a foil-lined cookie sheet.  Stick them in the freezer for ten minutes.

Remove the balls from the freezer and make them into their cupcake shape, by rolling them into a slightly oval shape and sticking the bottom half through a small flower-shaped cookie cutter. 

 

Stick them in the freezer again, for 10 minutes. 

Meanwhile, heat up some melting chocolate over the stove or in the microwave, according to the instructions on the package.  I found that the chocolate was a little too thick, and it was much more workable once I added some shortening to it.  After taking the cucpakes out of the freezer, dip the bottoms into the chocolate.  Bakerella’s instructions say to set them  upside down on the foil, with the chocolate in the air, but I found that setting them right side up allowed the chocolate on the bottom to even out and create a better base. 

While the chocolate is drying, heat up some more chocolate of a different color.  I bought pink, green and white, and combined the green and white to make a lighter green, although I wasn’t so enthused with the outcome. 

Dip the top of the cupcake bites into the chocolate, and immediately decorate with sprinkles and a red M&M.  I’m going to suggest that you buy more M&Ms than you think you’ll need. When I opened my bag of M&Ms I was dissapointed to discover that there were twice as many of each of the other colors than there were of red.  There were 23 red M&Ms and at least 40+ of each other color.  Lame!

And here was my result:

Yields about 50 cupcake bites.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 8:58 am and is filed under cooking + baking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.