Mountain Dew Cupcakes

Daniel made a request for Mountain Dew cupcakes, and of course I'm always game for trying a new recipe, and I like unusual recipes. He drinks Mountain Dew all of the time, so why not eat it in a cupcake? I found a recipe on How To Eat A Cupcake that I decided to tweak a little bit.

Cake Ingredients:

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup sugar

2 large eggs

1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons Mountain Dew soda

1 1/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons self-rising flour

1 (3.4 oz) package of lemon pudding (after I baked the cupcakes, I read somewhere that Mountain Dew is actually an orange-based flavor, but I never knew that! so, if you want to use a simple vanilla, that would probably be okay)

Cake Directions:

1. Preheat your oven at 325 degrees. Place 12 cupcake liners into a muffin tin to be ready when you're done with the batter.

2. Cream together the softened butter and 1 cup of sugar in a standing mixer or in a large bowl with a hand-held mixer. You'll want this to be light and fluffy, so around 3-5 minutes is a good time frame. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing until incorporated after each addition, scraping the sides of the bowl with a spatula when necessary.

3. In a separate, small bowl, mix all of the flour with the package of dry pudding mix. Alternately add in the dry ingredients and the Mountain Dew, starting with the dry and ending with the dry. I divided the dry ingredients into thirds (flour - Mountain Dew - flour - Mountain Dew - flour). The batter will be fairly thick.

After all of that, I took a second to lick the beaters, of course! The batter tastes like the lemon bars that I make, and it was wonderful.

4. Fill the prepared liners about 2/3 full, which for me is about a spoonful of the batter.

5. Bake for about 20-23 minutes, then let cool before topping with frosting.

It took my oven 23 minutes before a toothpick inserted into the center of the largest cupcake came out clean, so next time I will probably up the temperature to 350 degrees and reduce the time to around 18 minutes. You know your oven, though, so just keep an eye on them after around 15 minutes just to be safe. They'll be golden brown and beautiful like this once they are done:

The cupcakes are dense, almost like a pound cake, but they actually were quite yummy. They don't really taste like Mountain Dew, but they are still good. I will be doing some further tweaking next time, though, to try to get the taste closer to that of the Dew.

I was not a fan of the frosting I created to go with these, so I am not going to even bother posting the recipe for it. It was far, far too sweet, even for the sweetest of sweet-tooths. I didn't try the recipe from How To Eat A Cupcake, but I probably will the next time I make these. I advise that if you are going to make these, try that recipe!

I have two cupcake orders that I will begin working on tomorrow, so there will probably be a couple of new posts up by Friday morning at the latest! Make sure to check them out, because they are going to be SUPER cute :)