Either I Got Really Big or These Cupcakes Are Really Small

You know you're meant to have a baking blog when one of the most exciting events of college spring break is making cupcakes. Six hours of making cupcakes. But these aren't just any cupcakes! I should've taken a picture of one of these in my palm, because cupcake bites are small to be... well, a bite! I found these on bakerella.com, new to my list of favorite cooking blogs, and was DYING to make them. I had actually set out to make cupcake pops, a feat I will try someday, but ended up sticking to these because they were so cute and so much easier.

Cupcakes bites aren't very difficult, just incredibly time consuming. You start with a sheet cake (this is one of two cases in which it's acceptable to use a box mix) and cream cheese frosting (this is the only case in which it's acceptable to use a can). You take the sheet cake and break it up in a bowl and mix in the can of cream cheese frosting to make a type of pasty dough:



Bakerella's basic cakepop/cupcake bite recipe calls for a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. I figured I had to try the tried and true way, but... I also decided I had to give me own concoction a go ;) So batch one was the red velvet mix and batch two was a chocolate cake (box mix) and homemade peanut butter cream cheese frosting. Turns out one batch makes about 50 bazillion cupcake bites. Two batches multiply exponentially to make about 500 thousand bazillion. Which is why this whole project took about 6 hours total.



Ok maybe the total cupcake bite count wasn't in the bazillions... But I must have made at least 100. But anyway... back to the process. You can read more about how to make these on the Bakerella blog, there are step by step pictures there that I didn't think of taking. Basically you take your cake and frosting mixture and make balls with a diameter similar to a quarter, line them up on a baking sheet, and let them hang out in the freezer for an hour or so. Then, you fill a peanut butter cup candy molds half way with melting candy coating and place a cake ball in the center. Put them back in the freezer until the candy coating solidifies, which only take a minute or so, and then pop them out of the mold. In a bowl, melt another color of candy coating and dip the top of the cake ball in that color, drop a few sprinkles on and top with an M&M. DONE!

Unless you're like me and you come across tiny cellophane bags in one of the aisles at Michael's and then decide to buy a spool of ribbon and individually wrap dozens upon dozens of miniature cupcakes.

I really could've spent hours cranking these out. Even more than six.

Fortunately I found a way to speed up the packaging process that still looked really cute. I found this thin cardboard boxes, also at Michael's, in packs of three. They come in all different sizes!

MOST people preferred the chocolate and peanut butter combination (score one for me!), but the red velvet wasn't too bad either. I topped the red velvet ones with purple candy coating and the peanut butter ones with white just so I could tell the difference. I also ran out of brown candy coating at the end of the second batch and ended up using semi-sweet chocolate instead. The chocolate tends to melt in your fingers easier, but I think it tastes better. AND if you make a bazillion of these like I did ;) they keep really well in the freezer so you can hand them out for what feels like forever!