Trader Joe's Candy Cane Joe-Joe's Cupcakes

News does not take a holiday.

That means that if you work in the news business, you're going to be working holidays. Christmas, New Years, Easter, 4th of July, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, etc...you're going to be working most of, if not all, these days. After many years, you might get enough seniority to get one or two of those days off, but the fact of the matter is, you're going to be working while the rest of the world is enjoying a day off.

But we all know this going into the business, it isn't all bad. When I work a holiday, I always tried to make and take something in to celebrate. Over the past couple of years or so I've been working on making up my own recipes or tweaking recipes into something new. This year, I decided, for Christmas Eve, to take Trader Joe's Candy Cane Joe-Joe's and make up a cupcake based on them.



Trader Joe's Joe-Joe's are sandwich cookies, similar to Oreos, but so much better. They come in different flavors: chocolate cookies with vanilla filling, vanilla with vanilla filling, and, during the holiday season, candy cane (chocolate cookies with vanilla filling that had crushed candy canes mixed in).

I began with my favorite chocolate cake recipe. It's a Wilton recipe called Chocolate Fudge Groom's Cake. I made a couple of small changes to the recipe, it calls for 3 oz unsweetened chocolate. I used 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate and 1 oz of Trader Joe's Peppermint Hot Chocolate mix.





The recipe calls for 1 1/2 cup of milk, I heated the milk, mixed in the 1 oz of hot chocolate mix and let it cool to room temperature.



This gave the cake a very subtle peppermint flavor, but it was still chocolaty and moist.

For the icing, I made the usual buttercream icing I always make, I learned it from my Wilton cake class. I double the recipe because I have a fear of running out of icing.
~ Cream 2 sticks of unsalted butter and 1 stick of unflavored Crisco shortening
~ Slowly add 2 lbs of powdered sugar
~ Add a small amount of milk until the icing is the consistency you want

For this icing, I crushed 24 Candy Cane Joe-Joes cookies.



This could be done in a food processor, but I like putting them in a big Ziploc back and using a marble rolling pin to crush them by hand. I like the texture that comes with the varying sizes of the cookie pieces.

After creaming the butter and Crisco, I added the crushed cookies before adding the powdered sugar.



The icing was flavorful and rich! The cupcakes, overall, are very good! A moist cake, rich icing, and I was worried that it might be overpowering, too peppermint-y, but the flavor was just right.

Because of the different sizes of cookie pieces in the icing, I didn't get fancy with the decorating, there was just no use trying to squeeze this icing through a decorator tip. I used an off-set spatula and placed a mound of icing in the middle of the cupcake. Then I smoothed the sides and the top before sticking a Joe-Joe in the top.