The most delicious cupcakes ever... in a pie motif!

Remember the last time I did a cupcake post?  And I told you NOT to use the chocolate sheet cake recipe from  thepioneerwoman.com because its dry?

WRONG WRONG WRONG.  Use it.  Its the best ever.  I mistakenly told you that after sampling only one of the mini cupcakes I had made, and they were dry.  Mini cupcakes are just a bad idea.  Sorry if you like them.  But really.  A cupcake is already a smaller cake serving that normal.  Mini cupcakes are semi-worthless.  But they are easier to put flowers on, I'll give them that.

The sheet cake was SO good in fact... that it will be very difficult for me to stray from it in the future.  I'll have to (I guess) if someone wants a lemon chiffon cupcake or a cinnamon delight cupcake.  But if they want chocolate... I'm firmly decided that this is the only way to go.

So my next cupcake idea/creation came from a video I saw online.  The authors of the two cookbooks "Hello, Cupcake" and "What's New, Cupcake?" do a lot of great video demos.  Check em' out.

They are where I got this idea for cupcakes in a pie motif.

I began by smearing each cakelet with some leftover pink from the flower cupcakes.  Still delicious.  And more in keeping with the fruity color I was going for.

Let me insert a snippet about how TOUGH it is to find all red chocolate candies.  I didn't want jelly beans.  (Superman is picky that way.)  I really wanted mini m&ms.  But I don't live next to an m&m store where you can find any color in bulk... and I certainly didn't care enough to order online.  So these candies are Hershey's Bites in Special Dark.  They are red, dark red, and brown.  I had to pick out the browns.

After loading each cupcake with Hershey's bites and trying not to leave gaps... It was time to color my icing.  I used yellow and red food coloring and a dash of cocoa powder.  Next came the lattice tops.

Lattice is difficult.  You have to use something called the fly-line method.  I don't care to explain that so look it up if you really want to know.
But this is what they looked like after I did that and added a little pastry edge.  

Blurry.  Sorry.  

But its good to do that lattice with diagonals.  It looks prettier.

Now... despite finding the Hershey's Bites, I quickly realized I was not going to have enough red candies to do 32 cupcakes.  So I improvised.

If, like me, you don't really want to bite into a cupcake with fifty million m&ms crammed on top of it... you would have chosen my second version of the pie cupcake.  A closed crust.

For these... I iced each little baby with my crust colored icing and dipped the tops in raw sugar.  (I love raw sugar.  It's divine.  Plus it flattens the icing so you don't have to spread it perfectly.  Plus it looks more like pie.)

I then created little "slits" using chocolate sprinkles.  And then I added the same pastry edge I'd done with the others.  Here's the result.

Lots of pretty little mini pie cupcakes!!  I even picked out foil liners so they'd look like pie pans.  It's the detail-freak in me.

Still hope to post pics of my students teaching!  Unfortunately, my camera had a little mishap last week and is no longer with us.