Fake-Out Cupcakes

These are not cupcakes.  They are not sweet.  Instead, they are a savory herb and bacon flavor, like a tricked-out biscuit, but made to look like chocolate cupcakes.  To create this effect, I colored the batter with a liberal amount of brown food coloring and topped them with cream cheese piped on to look like pastel-tinted "frosting."  Green herbs can still show through the brown coloring so I infused the milk with herbs and strained them out of the milk before preparing the batter.  This recipe makes 12-15 cupcakes.

Step 1: Ingredients

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 teas salt
• 1 teas sugar
• 2 teas onion powder 
• 1/2 teas garlic powder
• 1/2 teas dried rosemary
• 1/2 teas dried thyme
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup milk
• 1/4 cup bacon bits
• 8oz whipped cream cheese 
• brown food coloring
• red food coloring
• yellow food coloring

Comments

[razzyray]

Interesting, I always thought of cupcakes as being only sweet.

[scoochmaroo]

Tricksy! How do they taste?

[starshipminivan]

They taste pretty good. The texture is definitely denser than that of cake but nobody noticed it in their frenzy to get the papers off. My husband brought them to work with him and set them out in the office where people normally put out doughnuts and such. Some people spit out their bites because they were expecting sweet and were shocked. Once they had recovered from their surprise and word spread that they were not cupcakes, they continued to eat them. However, I'm afraid one office sweet tooth now has a vendetta against me for destroying his cake illusions.

[Shindou]

That is absolutely hilarious about the vendetta:D Some people can't accept anything that is outside of the norm it seems.

I will have to try to make these someday.