Look into my eyes…

I’m going to make you giant cupcakes, and you’re going to like them.

I’m going to make you giant cupcakes, and you’re going to like them.

I’m going to make you giant cupcakes, and you’re going to like them.

So I made giant cupcakes a week and a half ago – along with some regular small ones – and I liked them. And, as a plus for any cook or baker, the other people who tried them said they liked them too. Now all I need is for another friend’s twins to also have their eighth birthday so I can make, upon request, another pair of giant cupcakes.

The first step to making giant cupcakes is to get a giant cupcake mold. This I accomplished through some internet searching, a little feedback from a friend, and a trip to the nearest store that had them in stock (Michael’s).

If you search like I did, you’ll see that Wilton is one of the few players in the Molde de Pastelito Gigante game. Repeatedly seeing the name Wilton also triggered the good memory of the early days of MLS when we’d be watching the Metrostars on tv and Andres Cantor on the Spanish broadcast would pronounce the players names, such as Welton, with a vigor that in Welton’s case made it, “Wellllllllllllll-tonnn.” I’m pretty sure it was Andres Cantor, of you know, Goooooooooooooooooolllllllllllll! renown, but please let me know me if you know otherwise. The closest confirmation I could find through solely internet searching was this article, in which the author reminisced, “Believe me, no one could make the name ‘A.J. Wood’ sound so extraordinary.” In the end, Welton turned out to be a four-year flash in the MLS cupcake pan.

The next step after acquiring a Wellllllllllllll-tonnn Giant Cupcake Pan was to find a giant cupcake recipe. I got some intel the twins liked chocolate, and I wanted to add a simple frosting, so I went with the following two recipes I found online:

• Giant Chocolate Cupcake (recipe by The Cookie Writer)
• Cream Cheese Frosting (recipe by Marin Mama Cooks)

I followed each recipe as written, except for how long I baked the cupcakes (I let mine bake a little longer). What worked well in my oven, based on my sample size of two giant cupcakes, was to bake the bottom-half of the cupcake for 75 minutes and the top-half for 55 minutes (at 325 degrees). The cupcake mold is a single connected piece – the well for the bottom-half is connected to the well for the top-half (see the picture below) – so as recommended by some others, I started by only adding the batter for the bottom-half. Then, 20 minutes into the baking (with 55 minutes left), I added the batter for the top-half.

Giant cupcake #1, here in two pieces after being taken out of the mold (top-half on L, bottom-half on R)

After the baking is done, the final steps are assembling the pieces and adding the frosting. Here’s a quick description of the process, based on what I did:

1. Take the base of the cupcake (R in the picture above) and slice off the rounded crown part
2. Take the top cone piece (L in the picture above) and slice off the rounded part that’s underneath
3. Spread a layer of frosting on the now-level surfaces to serve as the glue
4. Combine the two pieces to make one giant cupcake
5. And then spread the frosting on top to finish it off

Here’s how the two pieces looked after making the surfaces level (steps 1 and 2 above)

And how one of the giant cupcakes looked after full assembly and frosting

In the process of making the giant cupcakes, I also confirmed The Cookie Writer’s FYI that there would be cupcake batter left over. And so what to do with the extra batter? Make more cupcakes! Small regular ones in this case.

The full cupcake yield

After taking care of the extra batter, all that was left was the extra matter…of the rounded tops and bottoms that I had sliced off earlier to make the cupcake pieces level. Resisting the temptation to eat them right then, I turned two of these rounded parts into a giant whoopie pie, using the remaining frosting as the filling.

In an interesting bit of culinary timing, I had also made this giant whoopie pie and the giant cupcakes exactly one year to the day after having made a made a pair of giant cookies. A few friends were having a holiday cookie-exchange party on the same day last year, and I was making regular-sized, pumpkin-chocolate chip cookies for it. When I ran out of baking sheet space but still had some batter left over, I rubber-spatulaed the remaining batter into two large pie dishes. The result? Two giant awesome pumpkin-chocolate chip cookies. One of the party’s hosts is purported to have eaten most of one of the giant cookies in a single sitting the next day. The other giant cookie is purported to still be in my freezer.

And finally, to end with one more giant cookie memory (who knew there were so many???) and yes again, art, here’s something I made back in college (and recently reacquired when my parents started cleaning out our old rooms).

The class was called Two Dimensional Design, and the assignment was to tell a story using four items. (We had to do several of these.) Previously, we had been clipping interesting pictures out of magazines and making a mess with paint on paper, so I already had the top cookie picture and the 18″ x 24″ background sheet (in black-and-white splatter) ready to go. Then I added a brown layer to the background sheet, found some appropriate pictures of the family dog, and the story was complete. Cookie, cookie, everywhere, but not a bite to eat.

Before anyone feels too sorry for her, though, I can assure you that outside of art, in real dog life, she got many a food scrap, took her role as the pre-dishwasher cleaner-of-plates seriously, and was a success in the chocolate-acquiring business. One time she ate a third of my birthday cake off the kitchen table after my dad had briefly left the room, and another time she got and ate most of an entire bag of chocolate chips. It’s like they say: every dog has its day
(full of chocolate).

She was a good dog, we all loved her, and although Blondie was no giant (she came up to around our knees), I’m sure she would have had no problem taking care of an over-sized chocolate cupcake, or two.