Andi Williams joined Lehman’s merchant group just over two months ago, but she’s already served up a great treat for Country Life! She shared photos of the cupcakes she served from her son’s 16th birthday party: root beer floats and popcorn were featured.
After a trip to Lehman’s in Kidron, I was set to make root beer float cupcakes. I started with this recipe from a favorite baking site, which calls for TWO CUPS of root beer–it makes a rich, fudgy, tasty cupcake.
Lehman’s has a wide selection of root beers to choose from. I chose to make the cupcakes using Dad’s Root Beer and supplemented with Homebrew Root Beer Soda Pop Base.
I added 1 teaspoon of our Homebrew Soda Pop Root Beer Extract to the cake and 1 teaspoon to the topping. For the ‘ice cream’ on top of the cupcake, I made a heavily flavored vanilla butter cream.
This was a stiff butter cream. After topping with the root beer dream whip frosting, I used my small cookie scoop to put a scoop of the vanilla butter cream.
Then, I cut a straw in half, and popped it into the cupcake to decorate. I had a HAPPY 16 year old!
Root Beer Topping
1 package Dream Whip
1 4 serving size instant vanilla pudding
1.5 c milk.
1 teaspoon Homebrew Soda Pop Root Beer Extract
“Buttercream Ice Cream Scoop”
1.5 sticks butter
approx 3 c powdered sugar
2.5 teaspoons vanilla
Popcorn Cupcakes
I also made popcorn cupcakes. These were a simple vanilla box cake mix plus 2 teaspoons Waktins butter flavoring and 2 T Jiffy corn bread mix. I frosted them with the other half of the Dream Whip frosting flavored with 1 teaspoon Watkins butter flavoring.
These cupcakes were decorated with mini-marshmallow popcorn – I took 3/4 of a bag of mini marshmallows and dripped in a few drops of yellow food coloring and 1/2 t butter flavor, and shook the marshmallows around a bit.
The key is to NOT make them look uniform in color. This helps the marshmallows resemble the colors of microwave popcorn more closely. I spread the marshmallows out on a cookie sheet to dry.
Once they were dry, I melted 1/3 cup white melting chocolate, and stuck 3 marshmallows together with the white chocolate. I then topped the cupcakes with 4-5 clusters of marshmallow popcorn. (If you can’t find melting/coating/candymaking chocolate, you can use white chocolate chips.
I used a slightly thinned version of the vanilla ‘ice cream’ topping above to place the ‘popcorn’ on top of the vanilla-corn cupcakes.
