Dirt Cupcakes

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November 2012

I have many distinct food memories from my childhood. Many are wonderful, some not so pleasant.

The not so pleasant include not being able to eat Mexican food for years because I got the flu one day I had tacos for school lunch.  Another is the day in preschool when the snack was cutout shapes of American cheese. I hate American cheese and something about the thought of consuming a piece of American cheese that had been handled and left to sit out for so long and then jiggled in my face like it was somehow appetizing because it was the shape of a bear still makes me shudder.

Some of my most pleasant memories include cupcakes at school for a birthday, personal pan pizzas earned via Book It! or,  when I was really lucky, dirt pudding. Many times throughout the course of elementary school, a doting mother (or maybe father, who knows), would scoop chocolate pudding into little cups, top them with crumbled Oreos, stick a gummy worm on top and deliver those edible terrariums of delight to a classroom I lucky enough to be in. I reference school because that is the only place I can ever remember eating dirt. My mother was more the homemade chocolate chip cookie type, and I love her for that.

I recently had a tremendous craving for dirt.  Maybe it was because it was just before Halloween and my inbox was inundated with e-mails from cooking sites re: spooky desserts, many involving gummy worms. Either way, I began snooping around the interwebs, thinking I could evolve dirt into more “adult” dessert, and came up with dirt cupcakes.

There is actually nothing more adult about dirt cupcakes than dirt in any other form. I guess dirt cupcakes require using an oven, some cutting, and more than three ingredients, but they made me feel like I was eight years old again. I kept these really simple ie. semi-homemade. I used Kozy Shack Chocolate Pudding, a box of devil’s food cake mix, and a can of chocolate icing (homestyle of course).   Part of the reason I did this was because I was making them late at night after several glasses of wine at a sushi dinner and I didn’t feel like making a huge mess getting out everything from scratch. Also, in a tiny kitchen, box mixes sometimes just feel right.

Recipe is as a follows:

·      Bake cupcakes according to directions on box.

·      Once cupcakes have cooled, cut out top of cupcake, about an 1 ¼ inc deep, 1 in in diameter. Do not throw top away, although you will need to cut off excess cake so that it can be used as a “lid”. Put the “lids” aside.

·      Put spoonful of chocolate pudding in each cupcake and replace cupcake “lid”.

·      Ice cupcakes.

·      Crush up oreos by hand, or in food processor. Dip top of each cupcake into crushed oreos, or “dirt”.

·      Place a gummy worm on top.

·      Nom. Nom. Nom.