Frosting Creations - Two Recipes

At the beginning of May I won this super cool haul of Duncan Hines Cake and Frosting Creations.  Our church had a bake sale to raise money for Relay for Life, and I thought this would be great to make some treats using my winnings.

The first thing I made were cake mix cookies from the Duncan Hines website.  The original recipe calls for a cherry vanilla filling packet and dried cherries.  I used the orange creme flavor mix instead and switched out the dried cherries for extra white chocolate chips.

I liked how they turned out slightly orange-y colored.  They tasted very orange creamsicle-like.  I sampled quite a few before packaging them up for the bake sale.  Quality control is the most important part of baking.

The other thing I made with the Frosting Creations goodies was cherry vanilla cola cakes, again from the Duncan Hines website.

I had seen this supposed cupcake baking trick on Pinterest.  As this was for a bake sale, I thought it would be a great time to see if I couldn't get a nice round dome on the cupcakes.  Everyone likes a pretty cupcake!  The prettier something is, the better it seems to sell.

Yeah, I'm here to tell you, that trick does NOT work.  If anything, it made the cupcakes even flatter than usual!

NOT. COOL. PEOPLE.

Luckily, I remembered I had these plastic punch sized cups in my pantry.  I took the wrappers off the cupcakes and placed the cupcakes inside the punch cups.  I put the vanilla cherry frosting creations into a large zip bag and piped it onto the cupcakes in the cups.

This worked out great until I realized that when you pipe frosting, you use twice as much frosting as you would if you just spread it on with a spatula.  Doh!

So I frosted the other half of the cupcakes with chocolate marshmallow frosting creations.  

My logic is that marshmallows go with everything.

These are the marshmallow ones. You can tell this because they have marshmallows on them. 

 See how fancy that is?!

FANCY!

The cups actually turned out to be a good idea.  I brought forks so that people could just eat them right away if they wanted to. People actually thought I did it on purpose. Of course I didn't correct them.

So what do I think about the actual Frosting Creations?  I got a bit freaked out when I was mixing the powder into the unflavored frosting base.  The powder had this weird chemical smell and the frosting was sticky and stringy.  There was one brief moment where I thought I was going to have to make a mad dash to the store for different frosting.  I made my husband test taste the frosting first.  When he didn't fall over and proclaimed it to be tasty, I tried some myself.  It tasted just fine!

I was glad that I had already decided to pipe the frosting on the cupcakes at this point.  With how stringy the frosting was, I would have made a huge mess trying to apply it with an offset spatula.

In my search to find something to make for the bake sale, I found quite a few recipes that I'd like to make.  Most of them just use the frosting and the mix in, and aren't cake at all!  As I have two cans of frosting and only one mix in left, I'll probably have to go out and buy some more Frosting Creations to try them all out.

Have you tried Duncan Hines Frosting Creations yet?  If so, I'd love to hear about what you made and how it turned out for you.