Meatloaf Cupcakes by JoJo

Sometimes you have an idea that is just so amazing that you can't wait to get it going. That's how I feel about this recipe. Now I'm not saying I'm the only one who has done thing, or the only one who has ever come up with this idea, but let's just say that where I'm from, you can't get a meat cupcake! And after doing this all I can say is, *insert caveman voice* meat cupcake gooood.

 Ingredients Set One (Meatloaf Mixture):
2.5 pounds ground meat of choice. You can even mix up some meats. We picked turkey.
One package of bacon. (Again, we did turkey bacon)
3 cups of panko or bread crumbs
Two eggs
One large onion, chopped
2 cups of milk
Salt and Pepper to taste
2 tablespoons of brown sugar
2 tablespoons of dijon mustard
1/3 cup ketchup
4 tablespoons of steak seasoning
4 garlic cloves, minced
6 ounces of cheese of choice (We did a local provolone)

Ingredients Set Two (Barbeque Sauce):
1 cup ketchup
1 cup water
1/2 cup molasses
1/4 cup vinegar
1/4 cup dijoin mustard
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon of garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon of chili powder
1/4 teaspoon of hot sauce
1 tablespoon of steak seasoning
*Don't be a freaky deek and feel ashamed if you go get yourself a bottle of Famous Dave's or the like in place of creating your own sauce.  Not everybody is up to this, or may have the time.  Sauce sometimes is something that needs to be worked up to in the kithcen skill area.  Do what you feel comfortable with.

Ingredients Set Three (Potato Topping):
3/4 5lb bag of potatoes (3.75 pounds)
1 stick of butter
1/4 cup of milk
Salt and Pepper to taste

First we are going to start by making a BBQ sauce. The ingredients you are going to use are set two of ingredients. Just put all ingredients into a bowl and mix well. You are going to find that this is very... watery? Not really a thick texture. We're going to fix this by placing the BBQ sauce in a pan and letting it simmer on the stove. Make sure to keep your eye on this while working with the other things we're going to do. This should finish up in around 20-30 minutes. DO not boil - we don't want this burning.

 Now peel and cut your potatoes into small pieces. Boil in some salt water. You want to start the potatoes before the meatloaf because we want them at a simi cool state before we start the meat loaf. You'll see why later. Now, one the potatoes can easily be pierced with a fork, drain. Plop down a stick of butter with 1/4 cup of milk in with the drained potatoes and mash well. This is one of those times where you really don't want chunky mashed potatoes. We used a ricer first on just the potatoes, and then a masher with the milk and butter. Smooth, smooth, smooth. Once you get them nice and smooth salt and pepper to taste.

 Once the potatoes are mashed you are going to mix all the ingredients from set one. Yep, that's right! Once again we are just throwing everything together. Make sure to put them all into a decently sized bowl other wise the next part is going to be messier than it already is. Now, stick your hands in and mix everything together! You can try to do it other ways, but this will seriously work the best. Make sure to have a helper around if possible because you may find that you need more bread/panko crumbs. It's way easier to have them dumped them in for you if possible rather than having to wash your hands and add more yourself. Once you have it decently mixed together you can use a wooden spoon to mix it more if you feel the need.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In two giant cupcake pans (6 cupcakes) take 12 strips of bacon and line the tins with it. You can choose to use two pieces of bacon if you want.

Once you have the bacon inserted, fill each hole up halfway with the meat loaf mixture. With your fingers burrow a little bowl into the meatloaf. Make sure you don't go too deep, we don't want to see the pan. Take 1/2 ounce of cheese (your choice) and put it in your little meat bowl. Cover with more meatloaf, making a decent sized cupcake. Once you have 12 healthy looking cupcakes made, put in your oven for 15 minutes.

Now, hopefully you have been watching your BBQ sauce during all of this - stirring often. It should be done around this time. We had ours cook down to about half it's size which gave it the consistency we wanted. Now you can just leave it in your pot if you want to use a spoon later to add to your cupcake, but we put it in a plastic condiment bottle.  You will have leftovers of the sauce.

After you take the BBQ sauce completely off the heat, you should still have some baking time left on your cupcakes o'meat. I spent this time putting my mashed potatoes in a piping bag for frosting cakes. You do NOT have to get this fancy by any means, but I honestly just thought it would be easier. I used one piping bag full per 6 cupcakes.  You can also use a Ziplock bag for this.  Fill the bag, squeeze excess air out, seal, and cut a corner off, voila!  Piping bag!

 

Now we should be close to our 15 minutes being up. Remove cupcakes from oven and frost them with your mashed potatoes. Once done put back into the oven for 15-20 minutes. I know that meatloaf normally takes an hour but remember, this isn't a big loaf. The cupcakes are smaller so they don't need to cook that long. If you are feeling skeptical, keep one cupcake unfrosted that you can cut into to see if the meat is done.

Once cupcakes are done put them onto a plate and drizzle the BBQ over them. Enough to fully cover the cupcake. And there you go! I found this to be easier than I thought it would be! Timing everything can get a little stressful, but the majority of it was just mixing a bunch of stuff together. We did have mashed potatoes left over and ended up eating them on the side. Enjoy carnivorously!

Chocolate Spider Web Cupcakes

Cupcakes!?! Seriously, that is all you need to say to capture my attention. Whenever I see these heavenly little things, I secretly think, "mmm....CUUUUUPCAAAAAAKEEEEES!!!"  I will cut a bitch over a cupcake.  Imagine the power of the Hulk in the Avengers mixed with the excitement of Will Ferrell in the movie Elf right before he realized the department store Santa was a fake, and there you have it....cupcakes is serious business to me! The sad thing is, it's really hard to find a good cupcake in my town unless they are homemade. Our "specialty" bakeries that focus on them are not anything to brag about. Luckily, when I get to go see the BF in Wausau, WI, I get to hit up Sweet Lola's who has AMAZING and very creative cupcakes. (They have a Nutella one. Yeah, that's right, now I have you drooling.) All in all, though, we don't always have the time or energy to whip up a batch from scratch, and sometimes we feel a slight guilt about it. Nevertheless, you could also be one of those people where the idea of actually making cupcakes makes you giggle a bit inside as you relax with a glass of wine and a clean kitchen. In the end I have a recipe that works for everyone. It's a box mix with a little extra love added into it!

 Ingredients

1 cup of water
1 box of cake mix of your choice. As you can see, I quite obviously picked Betty Crocker's Chocolate Fudge
3 grade A large eggs
1 stick of non-salted butter
Cupcake wrappers
1 tub of white icing, found in any bakery area in your local grocery store

Melt the stick of butter in a large bowl.  Add the cake mix, eggs, and water.

Using a mixer, mix for one minute on low speed (or mix by hand until all batter is smooth). After that, blend the mixture for one minute on high (or find a big guy with muscles who can whip that up into a frenzy). You will see it start to fluff during the minute on high.






Now, in a cupcake pan, lay your cupcake wrappers down. Using either an ice cream scoop or melon baller, add your batter into the liners . If you have an ice cream scoop, do one scoop, for a melon baller, add three scoops. If you don't own either, use a spoon and fill them til they are half way full. (Don't feel bad if all you have is a spoon! That's all I had until I borrowed my friends melon baller. That thing sat in my purse for three days before I remembered to take I had it.) Bake the cupcakes at 350 for 10-20 minutes. Check with tooth pick to make sure cupcakes are done. To do this poke cupcake with a toothpick and once the toothpick comes out clean your cupcakes are done!

Once these are finished you should be seeing something along the lines of this. Those creases you are seeing are  because I had to do the three scoop option. If you have an ice cream scoop you wont be seeing those. But these puppies are going to have lovely frosting all on top of them so why do we care?


 Now, let's talk frosting. Feel free to just use store bought frosting if you want! But for me - I was trying to get these to taste as close to home made as possible. For the frosting I used Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate frosting recipe. I don't have a picture of the ingredients but I will set ya up nicely for this recipe.

Ingredients
One stick of butter
2/3 cups of cocoa (I used Hershey because it's what I had)
3 cups of powdered sugar
1/3 cup of milk
1 tsp of vanilla extract

 Put cocoa and butter into bowl and mix until creamy. Now take the powdered sugar and milk and add them into the bowl alternately, blending the whole time. Feel free to use extra milk if you need to. Once powdered sugar and milk aare completely mixed with the butter, add the cocoa and vanilla, and mix  well. Load this stuff onto your cupcakes and then use your tube of white icing/frosting to make the spider web look.