Totally random thing that I think you should know about me….I love baby carrots but every.single.time I eat a baby carrot I get the hiccups!  Isn’t that weird?

Anyway…

Typically I am NOT a baker.  I leave things like that to my sister Paula and Lisa.  With friends/family like that I don’t *need* to bake but yesterday for our Young Women’s New Beginnings night I was asked to bring cupcakes.  I wanted to do something fun and it appears I was craving a snickers because immediately that is what I started searching for through good ol’ google.

I found this recipe.  It looked like something I could do!

Here is what you’re going to need if you want to make these yourself:

Makes 24-30 cupcakes

For the cake:
1 (18.25 ounce) package devil’s food cake mix
1 (5.9 ounce) package instant chocolate pudding mix
1 cup sour cream
1 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs; lightly beaten
1/2 cup warm water
1 teaspoon of vanilla
24-30 frozen Snickers Miniatures (I used more than that, I bought a bag that had about 36 in it and then still used some frozen snack sized bars for the garnish on top)

Method
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Line (2) 12 cup muffin tins with paper liners.
3. In a large bowl, mix together the cake and pudding mixes, sour cream, oil, beaten eggs, vanilla and water.
4. Evenly divide the batter amongst the prepared pans.
5. Gently push a frozen Snickers Miniature bar into the center of the batter and smooth the surface making sure to cover the candy bar with batter.
6. Bake for 18-22 minutes, or until top is springy to the touch and a wooden toothpick inserted comes out clean.
7. Cool cupcakes thoroughly on wire rack.

Here are some pictures so that you can see how I did things.

Step 1 – how the batter looks all done without the snickers.

Cupcake liners filled about 2/3’s full

Place a snickers on top of each cup of batter

I used a toothpick and pushed them down into the batter

The recipe says to make sure your candy is covered with batter so I used a spoon and smoothed the batter over the top of the candies

Here they are baked up and cooling on a rack

Here is the frosting recipe:

For the frosting:
2 sticks unsalted butter; room temperature
1/2 cup shortening
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 pounds confectioners’ sugar (friendly help – 1.5lb of powdered confectioners’ sugar is right about 5 1/4 cups)
1/3 cup caramel topping; plus more for drizzling
1/4 teaspoon salt

Method1. Cream the butter and shortening in the bowl of an electric or stand mixer. Add the vanilla extract, salt and caramel syrup and combine well.
2. Begin adding in the sugar and mixing thoroughly after each addition. After all of the sugar has been added and mixed thoroughly, give it a taste and decide if you want to add in more caramel syrup. For thicker frosting you can gradually add in a little more sugar.

Butter & shortening creamed together

Everything except the powdered sugar

Powdered Sugar added (this stuff tastes so yummy!)

I do NOT have all the cool decorating tips (I mentioned above I don’t do a lot of baking right?…) so my go to product for frosting is a ziplock bag!  I cut a hole in the corner of the bag about the size I want to use and go from there…so far it hasn’t let me down!

Here are the cupcakes all decorated and looking yummy.  I used my ziplock bag and put my frosting on top of the cupcake and then used crushed up snickers (I had them frozen in their back and whacked them with the handle end of a butter knife it left me some big chunks and some almost powder, it was perfect).

Once I added the snickers I used Hershey’s caramel.  I just drizzled it over the top of them.

This pictures job is to show you that decorating these cupcakes is NOT a clean process, the caramel drips down the sides (before I put them up I’ll take the tinfoil wrapper off which reminds me – Paula just informed me that you’re suppose to keep the paper liner inside the tinfoil liner!!!  Did you know that?  Please tell me you didn’t and that I’m not alone!) and the snickers gets everywhere but the taste makes up for the mess I promise!

So, there you go.  I was able to get 28 cupcakes out of 1 batch and aside from taking a little longer than normal cupcakes to make they were quite easy and seriously yummy!

(here is where I also apologize for the picture quality – with 7 kids you can imagine this isn’t something I did during the day so you’re getting night time pictures.)

There was one little thing I wanted to add to make these even a bit more dressed up if you will.  I have seen like 30 tutorials on how to do this but I didn’t follow any of them and cannot for the life of me think of what to call it so I can try to search for it to show you how to do it – SO I’ll just have to tell you.

I wanted to make little chocolate hearts to put on top of the cupcakes.  I have Hershey’s milk chocolate chips so I used about 1/4 – 1/3 of the bag (and it was more than enough) – put it in a glass bowl and put it in the microwave for 30 seconds and stirred, put it in for another 30 seconds and stirred – did this 3-4 times until it was all nicely smooth and melted.  I then did my ziplock trick and clipped a tiny corner off the bag.  I put parchment paper on a cookie sheet and just free hand drew hearts on the parchment paper.  After just a few minutes (like 10 tops) in the freezer they came off the parchment paper with no problems at all and were pretty easy to transfer onto the cupcakes.  I would assume that if they get warm enough the chocolate hearts will melt but they held up for our fun evening!

See how cute they are!

Just one more little touch of love!

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