CTC Cupcake

I’m coming up on my 1 year anniversary at work and have been doing some intense research on which cake I want to bring in to celebrate (because obviously I’m making myself a cake). I was perusing a new-to-me blog, Baking with Blondie, after seeing her pop up in my Instagram explore tab for the past little while. I didn’t see anything that truly spoke to me, but there was one cake that stopped me in my tracks.

See, Kristine is the world’s biggest Cinnamon Toast Crunch fan, plus her birthday is at the end of August. I immediately bookmarked this cake and figured out how I could turn it into cupcakes for the best birthday surprise ever. My only hesitation with this was that the recipe calls for a BOXED CAKE MIX which is strictly verboten on Planet Byn. If I had more time I’m sure I could have figured out how to make this from scratch, but just rolled with it for this occasion.

Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cupcakes

This recipe is genius because it has CTC in all 4 components of the recipe as follows:

  1. Crust: crushed up CTC mixed with melted butter
  2. Cupcake: shout out Christina Tosi, because we’re making our own CTC infused cereal milk here and adding it to the cupcake batter
  3. Icing: finely ground CTC mixed into cinnamon-vanilla buttercream
  4. Garnish: one cute little CTC as a decoration

I haven’t been this excited about a recipe in a long time. I’m not a huge Cinnamon Toast Crunch fan, but I was just to hyped up to make these because I knew Kristine would love them. I was especially enthusiastic about the Cinnamon Toast Crunch crust, which was a theme this month, after adding a full graham cracker crust to each cake layer in my niece’s Ultimate S’mores Birthday cake.

CTC Crust

Kristine loved these and sources say she even shared a few!

Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cupcakes

Source: Baking with Blondie

Ingredients

Cereal Crust

  • 3 cups Cinnamon Toast Crunch
  • 4 tbsp butter, melted

Cupcakes

  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 1 cup crushed Cinnamon Toast Crunch
  • 2/3 cup sour cream
  • 1/3 cup vegetable oil
  • 4 egg whites
  • 1 tbsp vanilla
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 box Duncan Hines white cake mix

Cinnamon Toast Crunch Frosting

  • 1 cup butter, room temperature
  • 2 cups Cinnamon Toast Crunch, pulsed to a fine powder
  • 1 tbsp vanilla
  • pinch salt
  • 1/2 cup whipping cream
  • 5 cups icing sugar

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 325° and line two cupcake pans with liners. Before you get started, combine the 1 cup of buttermilk with 1 cup crushed Cinnamon Toast Crunch and let soak for 30 minutes while you work on the cereal crust.
  2. For the cereal crust, pulse the Cinnamon Toast Crunch in a food processor until it’s fine crumbs. Add the melted butter and pulse again until combined.
  3. Add 1 tbsp of the cereal mixture to each cupcake liner. Use clean fingers or the back of a spoon (I used a pestle) to press down into an even crust. Bake for 5 minutes.
  4. For the cupcakes, first strain out the liquid from the buttermilk/cereal mixture with a fine mesh sieve, pressing on the cereal to extract as much liquid as possible.
  5. Add the infused cereal milk to a large bowl, and whisk in the sour cream, vegetable oil, egg whites, vanilla and cinnamon until thoroughly combined. Sift in the cake mix and stir until just combined (Note: yes, you must sift. I didn’t and had some annoying clumps).
  6. Divide the batter among the cupcake liners and bake for 18-22 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre of a cupcake comes out clean. Let cool completely before frosting.
  7. For the frosting, add the butter to a large bowl and whip until light and fluffy. Add the Cinnamon Toast Crunch powder, vanilla, salt and cream and whip again until combined. Add the icing sugar and mix again until smooth.
  8. I used a piping bag with a large round tip to pipe big poofs of icing on top of each cupcake, then used an offset spatula to spread it out a bit and make a decorative swoop, then added 1 CTC square as a garnish.