Pinterest Challenge: Death by Oreo Cupcakes

This Saturday I took a chance on a new dessert recipe to take to a dinner at my sister-in-law's place. The choice? Death by Oreo Cupcakes from Decor and the Dog. I almost never buy Oreo cookies, partly because they go so fast around here, so I thought this was a chance worth taking. 

These cupcakes start with an Oreo cookie in the bottom of the muffin liner. The Oreo gets topped with chocolate cake batter mixed with crushed up Oreo pieces. And eventually the whole thing is topped by homemade cream cheese frosting and more crushed up Oreos. 

This was my first time making cream cheese frosting. I'm not sure I'd do that again. Despite adding nearly 4 cups of powdered sugar, more than 1 table spoon of vanilla extract, and all remaining crushed Oreos, it still tasted very strongly of cream cheese. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't my favorite.

The cupcake itself was very good - but I didn't anticipate that I would get 30 cupcakes out of it! I had figured on 24, and kept out 24 whole Oreos to be my cupcake bases. When I'd finished topping all the cookies, I still had a lot of dough left. I wound up with six cookie-less cupcakes, but they were just as good as the cookie based version. I don't know if my cupcakes were a little skimpy (I tried to fill to just over half-way) or if that's just the difference the Oreo base makes in the amount of dough needed for each cupcake.

We wound up postponing the trip to the sister-in-law's. Fortunately there were a few people in town we could call on to come help us eat them up. It saved me from eating them all myself. Okay, I might have let my husband have a few.  If he could beat me to them. They were good - and all the more reason to avoid buying Oreos!