Bacon Blueberry Pancake Cupcakes

While flipping through The Cupcake Diaries early this week, a recipe caught my eye - Bacon Blueberry Pancake Cupcakes. I wasn't sure whether to cringe or not because I'd never considered bacon as a cupcake ingredient. My curiosity got the better of me though, and I knew that I had to try these cupcakes, if for no other reason than to discover whether or not they were as gross as a little part of me imagined they could be (for the record, they were most definitely not gross).

I was not exactly sure what to expect with these. They had the potential to go one of two ways - delicious, or disgusting. They fared on the delicious side, as I was pleasantly surprised to find. The flavours go surprisingly well together, the cupcakes stay moist due to the maple syrup in them, and the salty bacon is offset nicely by the sweet blueberries. I highly recommend that you all give these a try! And, in hindsight, considering my love of breakfast foods, I'm not sure how I could have doubted these little gems.

This recipe will make you 24 cupcakes, for which you'll need:
6 slices maple bacon
1 3/4 cup plus 1 tsp sugar
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 large eggs, at room temperature
2 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
Seeds from 1 vanilla bean (or an additional 1-2 tsp vanilla)
1 1/4 cups milk, at room temperature
1/2 cup pure maple syrup
1/2 cup fresh blueberries

Maple Cream Cheese Icing:
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
12 oz cream cheese (1 1/2 sticks)
8 cups icing sugar
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees, and line muffin pans with baking cups or grease them to avoid sticking. Fry the bacon until very crunchy, sprinkle with the 1tsp of sugar, and then remove from the heat, strain the grease, and chop up into fine bits. Set the bacon aside for use later. Next, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt, and set it aside as well.

Place the butter and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer and beat on medium speed until well incorporated. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing slowly after each. Combine the vanilla, vanilla bean seeds (if using) and milk in a liquid measuring cup. Reduce the mixer speed to low and alternately add the flour and milk mixtures, stopping to scrape the sides as needed. Mix slowly until just combined. Add the maple syrup, mixing slowly. Then, using a spatula, gently fold the bacon bits and blueberries into the batter.

Scoop the batter into baking cups and bake for 18-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre of a cupcake comes out clean. Allow the cupcakes to cool entirely.

For the frosting, combine all the ingredients in the stand mixer and beat until smooth and well combined. Turn the mixer to high speed for a couple of minutes at the end to get a light, whipped icing. Ice the cooled cupcakes as desired, and voila!

Let me know what you think of these cupcakes! The great thing about them is that, you could conceivably legitimize eating them for breakfast. Bacon, blueberry pancakes, maple syrup, cream cheese - all legitimate breakfast foods. And what could be better for breakfast than dessert? I have yet to discover an answer to that. Maybe you could make these into your Sunday morning family breakfast. I'm sure they'll thank you for it!

If you're considering bacon in your dessert, here are a few other options if blueberry isn't for you (and please let me know the results if you try any of these!):
Maple Bacon Cupcakes
Maple French Toast and Bacon Cupcakes
Bacon Cupcakes: Sunny Side Up
Chocolate Bacon Cupcakes

Enjoy the weekend, and please feel free to subscribe to the blog or visit the Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube pages for more delicious updates!

Maple Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

I don't know about you, but I love this time of year - the sun is shining, the temperature is rising, cupcakes in the oven, and spring is on its way. In my family this means one thing - syrup season. As I have cousins who have a sugar bush, I've grown up knowing that this time of year means fresh,  pure maple syrup. In honour of this marvelous time of year, I decided to make maple cupcakes.

I'd never made (or even tried) maple cupcakes before this experience, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Don't get me wrong, I do love maple syrup but thus far I'd only had it with pancakes, waffles and so on, but never in cake. I found a recipe in The Cupcake Diaries, however, and it seemed fitting for a first attempt. The recipe was for maple chocolate chip cupcakes, which you can find here. It also suggested a chocolate ganache frosting, however I didn't have any heavy cream and opted for the maple cream cheese icing instead.

I knew while they were baking that the cupcakes were going to be good, as there was an incredible scent filling the kitchen as they were nearing the end of their baking time (which I found to be a little longer than the recipe indicated - about 21 minutes rather than 18-20). Wanting to get the full experience of the cupcakes, I tried on before they were iced just to experience the cake on its own. The maple syrup ensured that the cupcakes stayed extremely moist while baking, and provided a delicious flavour.

Next was the icing. It was a basic cream cheese recipe (which you can find here) but had an added 1/4 cup of maple syrup. While it was a nice icing, it was extremely sweet. And when I say extremely, I mean it. It was basically a sugar coma in the making, but tasty nonetheless. And cake is cake, so who am I to complain? I do think I'll make sure to have heavy cream on hand next time though to try them with the ganache frosting instead.

Cream Cheese Frosting

The cream cheese frosting I used for the filled Red Velvet cupcakes came from Cupcake Diaries, although I used more vanilla than the recipe suggested. I also used this recipe with the Maple Chocolate Chip Cupcakes by adding 1/4 cup maple syrup to the mixture.

4 tbsp butter (1/4 cup)
6 oz cream cheese (3/4 brick of cream cheese)
4 cups icing sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla (I use about 1 tsp)
1/4 cup maple syrup (if making maple cream cheese frosting)

Beat all of the ingredients together in a stand mixer until well combined and smooth. I like to beat my icing on high for a couple of minutes once everything is combined to make the icing lighter (unless I'm covering it with fondant or something where it's going to be flattened anyway).

Chocolate Ganache-Filled Red Velvet Cupcakes

Growing up, my sister and I didn't always get along, but now that we've grown up I think you could probably go so far as to even call us friends. So, when she asked if I'd make a cake for her 20th birthday, I was more than happy to oblige (after first having a mid-life crisis because my baby sister is 20, which makes me just plain old).

She requested Red Velvet, which I realize I've already mentioned in a previous post. However, these were not just basic Red Velvet cupcakes. They were filled with chocolate ganache, and were made with a different recipe than the previous cupcakes. If you read my last post, you'll notice that the recipe I used came from Baking With The Cake Boss, and while the cupcakes were definitely red, they were also pretty bland. For these cupcakes, I used a recipe found in Cupcake Diaries (at this point I feel the need to mention that I have still yet to watch Cake Boss, and also that I've never seen DC Cupcakes either - Cupcake Diaries was referred to me). This is the third Red Velvet recipe I've used to date, and it's probably my favourite. You can find it, the chocolate ganache recipe, and the cream cheese recipe on the Recipes page! 

What I instead wanted to talk about was filling cupcakes! I've done this a few times now, and have used two different methods. The first was simply using a Wilton 230 decorating tip to penetrate the cupcake and fill it with the filling of choice. I'm not partial to this method because you cant tell how much you've put into the cupcake, and therefore there is often too little filling as opposed to too much in order to avoid the cupcake breaking. I found that the majority of the filling ended up being absorbed into the cupcake this way because there was so little of it.

Recently, however, I purchased a cupcake corer from Golda's Kitchen. This is what I used when making my sister's cupcakes, and it made filling them a very easy, straightforward process. All you need to do is:

1. Bake cupcakes of choice, as per insturctions
2. Allow cupcakes to cool (you don't want to core them while they're too warm or you'll risk breaking the cupcake)

3. Position corer over centre of cupcake and gently push downward

4. Once corer has been inserted into the cupcake, twist the corer back and forth to cut the inside of the cupcake

5. Remove corer from cupcake, and remove cupcake centre from corer

And voila, cored cupcakes, ready to be filled. If you're using the ganache, like I did, you'll want to make sure it's cooled before filling the cupcakes. Once they're filled as desire, ice your cupcakes and enjoy!