How to Make a PieCupcaken

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     The other day I was watching a local morning show. They had a chef from the Four Seasons Restaurant on the show doing a segment about the PieCaken, the dessert answer to the Turducken. It was an amazing thing. If you can't decide if you want to eat a piece of cake or a piece of pie, you can have a PieCaken. He quickly showed how he made it and I thought, "I have to try this!". But, I had a
few roadblocks because, for one thing, the end result was so huge! When the chef made it , he used pecan pie and pumpkin pie in a spice layer and a maple layer of cake. It looked so cool when he sliced it, but it also looked like a lot to eat. I didn't think a pie would fit into my regular 9" round cake pans either.

    I researched around the internet a bit to see who else was making this thing. One media commentator said that this dessert had been around for quite a while in the dessert underground. I didn't even know that there was a dessert underground! So I was talking to Alicia about my desire to make one and blog about it and also my dilemmas and she suggested that I turn it into a cupcake version! Genius! (Then I saw today that it had been done before, but I still think my daughter is a genius!) We decided that we would try to make it a little lighter and use angel food cake with a cherry pie filling.
     Here is how we made our version of the Piecupcaken:

First I used my mom's Pie Crust Recipe and a 2 inch bisquit cutter to fill my mini muffin tins with crust. Bake them at 400 degrees F. for 15 min.
Meanwhile, mix up an angel food cake mix.

Cool the shells briefly when they come out of the oven and then fill them with cherry pie filling. Put cupcake liners in a regular sized muffin tin and put a ladle full of cake batter in the bottom. Then, set the filled pie shell in the middle of the batter. Top the little pie with more cake batter.
Bake in a 350 degree oven for 25 min. I tried this for 20 min, but the fluff of the cake didn't hold up as well as at 25, even though the cake batter did cook all of the way through at both tries.

     When it comes out of the oven it looks like a regular cupcake. We were worried that the angel food batter would be too fluffy to hold up, but it was fine! You can see the pie peeking through a little bit, but there was no sogginess on the bottom or anywhere.

     We frosted them with a light and fluffy Marshmallow Cream Frosting. We found the recipe for it on Kraft. Add a few sprinkles and there you have it! A Piecupcaken!  A pretty, delicious and original Christmas dessert!

     One of the benefits of this pie, cake mash-up is that the crust does allow you to have a fruity center of the cake, without it getting soggy and the fruit sinking to the bottom of the cake.
  While we worked on this we came up with some other flavor combinations to try:

• Cherry Pie-Chocolate Cake to make a Black Forest type PIecupcaken.
• My husband says Pecan Pie and German Chocolate!
• Cherry or Strawberry Pie with Lemon Cake.
• Apple Pie with Spice Cake.
• Peach Pie with Yellow Cake or Spice Cake

So many possibilities! Let me know what combinations you come up with!