Is your BBQ filled with boring foods like hamburgers and mashed potatoes?
Do your friends groan when you invite them over?
Change that by serving them savory, bacon cupcakes when they come over.

Step 1: Preparations:

Depending on how you make your cupcakes, the prep time could range from 15 minutes to over an hour. If you make each food at home it will take longer, but if you use store bought foods it's much faster. Cooking time is 30 minutes. Overall it took me 1 hour to make this batch.

Ingredients: (for half a dozen of each filling)

3 potatoes
1 cup of grated cheese
7+ strips of bacon
1 cup beef with sauce
Whole milk
Salt
Pepper
Butter
Cooking Oil

Step 2: Making the Cups (1)

First, peel all three potatoes. Cut off any blemishes and stray bits of skin. Chop your potatoes into medium sized chunks. Place chunks into a pot. Add water to the pot until all the potatoes are submerged. They should be completely covered. Cover the pot and boil the potatoes on high until they are soft and slippery. A good test would be to poke a potato with a knife: if it falls off the knife it is cooked.

Step 3: Making the Cups (2)

Drain the water off the cooked potatoes. Using a masher, break the large chunks of potatoes down. Add some butter to make the potatoes pliable. It isn't important to make them soft yet, we just need them to be smaller.

Step 4: Making the Cups (3)

Add whole milk, salt, and pepper. Then, using beaters, mix potatoes until they become light and fluffy. The amount of milk you need depends on personal preference, similarly with salt and pepper.

Step 5: Making the Cups (5)

Using a teaspoon or your fingers, put some potato into each slot of a greased muffin tin. Spread it around evenly, pushing it well up the walls. This doesn't need to be pretty but it should be complete. Don't leave any blank spaces in your cups and don't make the walls too low.

Step 6: Adding Filling

Using your favorite "meat in sauce" recipe (here we used beef in BBQ sauce) or some shredded/ grated cheese fill each cup. Don't skimp on filling: when cooked it will help hold the potato together.

Step 7: Covering the Cups

Covering the cups in the hardest part of this recipe. The mashed potatoes always seem to prefer to stick to my hands instead of the other potatoes, so it takes me a few minutes to settle them all down. As you can see, some of the cheese managed to escape even with all of my efforts.

Step 8: Toppings

And now the pièce de résistance: bacon. For my toppings I only used bacon, but gravy or melted cheese could be used as a nice frosting with the bacon sprinkles. Once you are satisfied, you can bake your cupcakes.

Step 9: Cooking

This batch took 30 minutes on 375 degrees (Fahrenheit). This number can vary wildly, especially if you use prepackaged foods. A good indicator is browning on the potatoes. If you still can't tell, pull your muffin tin out from the oven and see if you can pull the potato away from the side of the tin with a knife. If you can, and it looks brown on the side, they are probably done.