"Doublemeat Palace"

Buffy: "Wait. The secret ingredient in the beef is... beef?"

At work we have a themed potluck at the end of every week. When I found out that last week's theme was 'cookout,' the first thing that came to mind was BURGERS! And I don't mean I made actual burgers for the potluck. No, I made Burger Cupcakes.

Oh yes. I initially saw a picture of this on my twitter feed from @CupcakeBlog(Cupcakes Take the Cake). You can see the original post here: http://cupcakestakethecake.blogspot.com/2009/03/are-they-burgers-or-cupcakes.html

I found a lot of pictures of burger cupcakes online, but I wanted to do something a little different.

Here are the ingredients:

Buns - vanilla cupcakes, cut in half

Burger - brownies, cut into circles

Ketchup - red frosting

Mustard - yellow frosting

Lettuce - coconut, dyed green

Cheese - Yellow melting wafers, molded into squares

Sesame Seeds - actual sesame seeds (!)

Make burgers! I put frosting on every layer to make sure there was enough and to help with keeping the layers together. I tried to make them all varied with different "ingredients," ie. some with cheese or without, same with the lettuce. There is no wrong way to do it.

The reason I went with melting wafers for cheese: I looked at a lot of sites and from what I saw, the cheese (if there was any) was done with frosting. I wanted it to look different from the mustard and to stick out. I had a silicone tray of squares that I melted it into and I think they look great! Bonus: It added that extra punch of sweetness since there is a whole lot of cake and not a lot of frosting.

Trials and errors: I had really wanted to make the lettuce out of frosted flakes. I had thought that they would taste well with it, look a lot more like lettuce, and would just be plain cool. However, because they are so moisture-free, the second that drop of food coloring hit a flake, it sucked up the liquid. So they were mostly splotchy frosted flakes and that just wouldn't do. Next time, I may try using regular cornflakes and dipping them into green melting wafers...?

I can say that these were a HUGE hit at work! Almost everyone loved them (One didn't due to the fact that she couldn't get over a cupcake looking like a burger).

I hope you decide to make them as well!

Be crafty,

Kris