Cupcake “Sliders”

This past Father’s Day my daughter decided that she wanted to make something fun for dessert for her dad– and since she’s recently been obsessed with “food impostors,” we thought it would great to make cupcakes that looked like cheeseburgers– mini cheeseburger sliders, of course, since full-sized ones would be a bit too much for even my husband’s sweet tooth to handle!

We decided to keep things simple and use box mixes as our base ingredients– a box of french vanilla cake mix, and a box of fudge brownie mix (though to avoid having a gigantic plateful of cupcakes we only used half of the cake mix).

After baking up seven large cupcakes (overfilled for maximum dome) and a pan of brownies, we sliced the cupcakes in half to mimic hamburger buns, and used a 2″ round cutter to cut out the brownie hamburger “patties.” Since the brownies were a bit thicker than a proportional patty would be, we deliberately cut the patties smaller than we wanted, and squished them down gently to both flatten them and spread them out to a larger size.

For condiments, we added food coloring to a batch of basic American buttercream (butter, powdered sugar, a few tablespoons of heavy cream, vanilla, salt) to make red, green, and yellow frosting (and combined some red and yellow to make “cheese”).

We used a regular round tip for the condiments, and a leaf tip for the green to make it slightly more leafy in appearance.

I wish I’d had sesame seeds in the pantry for added verisimilitude, but there was no way to get any in time, so I used coarse demerara sugar.

Delicious!

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