Chocolate-Pineapple Mini Cupcakes

My hubby and I made the most wonderful dessert today, and I ate so much of it while I was cooking that now I'm about to burst. Discomfort aside, this dessert rocks! I found a link to make these through http://www.craftzine.com/, which pointed me over to Bakerella at http://bakerella.blogspot.com/2008/05/cupcake-bites-made-easy.html for a recipe for cupcake bites. Now mine look nowhere as nice as hers do - she used a hard candy coating with sprinkles for the top, and mine just has frosting - but they taste wonderful none the less. We followed Bakerella's instructions but came up with our own delightful combination of flavors.

I bought a couple of candy molds at Michaels. We weren't sure what size to buy, so we got one set that are really small and look kinda like Riece's Peanut Butter cups, and another one that is bigger and meant to be for filling with fruit or custards or something. It turned out that the smaller ones are definitely the way to go. The larger ones ended up being a lot more than bite size. So, first you make a cake of your choice and bake it, let it cool, then crumble it up and mix it with frosting to make a mooshy mixture. (My own professional cooking terms.) We chose pineapple cake and cream cheese frosting.You ball it up so that it will fit nicely in your candy molds, and stick the balls in the freezer to firm them up for a few minutes.

You then melt your chocolate in a double boiler (we used dark chocolate) and pour some into your molds. Before the chocolate can harden, you stick your cake balls into the mold so it sticks out the top. Then you stick the molds in the freezer again for the whole thing to harden up again. Then you pop them out and decorate them! Bakerella dipped the top of hers into melted candy. I'd love to try this but hubby wasn't up for it this time. Maybe next time. :) Instead, he decorated them with a frosting tip and what was left of the cream cheese frosting.

Let me only say again that these are heavenly! They are really easy to make too, although a little time intensive.