Cream Filled Cupcakes

These were made for Sara's mom. I am proud of myself because I kept this blog in mind as I made my cupcakes, so I took photos as I went along!

I got this magazine at work the other day (thank you, Sara, for telling me about it!), which is where this idea came from:

To begin with, these were most of the ingredients that I used:

Pump, icing bag and large star tip, vegetable oil, vanilla, marshmallow cream, salt, confectioners sugar, two cans of icing, cupcake holders, Crisco shortening, cake mix, and eggs. There's a bottle of vinegar in the back... ignore that. Also, I used water and another icing tip as well, a round one.

The obvious first step being to make the cake batter and evenly distribute it into the 24 cupcake holders. I actually used an ice cream scooper to help make sure it was done evenly. BTW, the recipe calls for devil food cake, like hostess cupcakes, but Sara wanted yellow. =)

Fresh out of the oven.

The cupcakes really turned out to be a nice golden color, and all were pretty much cooked evenly. None turned out insanely larger than other--I was pleased. I let the cupcakes sit for a few minutes and then took them out of the pans and put them in the fridge to cool while I made the filling.

For the filling, you start of by mixing 1/4 tsp of salt into 2 tsp of hot water until the salt completely mixes into the water. Set that aside to cool. In a small bowl, you mix the 7 oz of marshmallow cream, 1/3 cup of confectioners sugar, 1/2 cup of shortening, and 1/2 tsp of vanilla. The marshmallow cream was SO sticky and kind of hard to work out of the container. I used a small standing mixer that had about 10 different levels on it for mixing. Around 8 or 9 was 'whipping cream' or something like that. I used that (eventually) and finally got the cream to fluff up like it was supposed to. After doing that, you mix in the salt water to complete the filling. Here's what it (eventually) looked like for me:

The recipe talked about using a regular icing bag and tip for inserting the cream, but I have this to use instead:

I bought it at Michael's a while back. It comes with a few different tips, but I usually only use it when I'm doing fillings. It's a bit too bulky for my liking when I'm just putting icing on a cake or cupcakes.

Anyways, I took that pump and filled it with the cream filling:

After having that completely ready to use, I took the cupcakes out of the fridge and arranged them on the platter that I was going to use:

The pump ended up being a bit tougher to use than I expected. As long as you have a strong hand and can apply the right amount of pressure, it works out well. All you have to do is insert the tip into the cupcake and push down the trigger on the pump and pull the tip back out as you apply pressure:

I was surprised as to how quickly I managed to fill the cupcakes. After doing the first few, I sped through the rest.

All filled and ready to have the icing put on them. The icing in the recipe was actually chocolate ganache (Anyone ever had that?? I haven't!) which is just 3/4 cup whipping cream and 6 oz chocolate chips for ingredients. However, this time, just regular icing was used. I decided to use a rounded tip for the first time. =)

I thought about using a star tip be then decided to use this one instead.

However, I felt like the cupcakes were still missing...something. Plus, I still had some of the filling left over, and I already had the start tip out... So...

Ta-da!

For the complete recipe of this cupcake (the original one), go here.