Tiramisu Cupcakes: Some Assembly Required

I have now mastered baking! ...well, at least I no longer suck at it. I have been able to successfully make several batches of cupcakes without forgetting any vital ingredients (I'm not sure I really illustrated how bad I used to be at baking in my first post). Those apple butter filled cupcakes? Yeah, I also made some filled with pumpkin butter. Those were good...NOT THE POINT. The point is, I decided that I was ready to take on a challenge - The Tiramisu Cupcake. These are fancy. Very fancy. I mean, look at them up there! Yeah, they were super fun to make too.

So, you may be wondering where all of my cupcakes go. Well, I give them mostly to my husband's team at Microsoft. Now, I'm not saying that my cupcakes help him keep his job, but I have been told that they have come up as a very important topic in meetings on more than one occasion. So of course fancy homemade tiramisu cupcakes are a great thing for him to bring to the office to share with his coworkers and multiple bosses.

Making these cupcakes was not unlike putting together furniture from Ikea. First was baking vanilla cupcakes. Next came mixing the liquor and coffee (that's right, more cupcakes with alcohol). Then was "coring" the cupcakes, followed by coating the inside with the liquor/coffee mixture. A vegan cream cheese frosting was then made (I added a little of the coffee liquor mixture to it, just for a little something extra) and the cupcakes were filled with the frosting.

Then the cores were placed back on the cupcakes. Next a dollop of frosting was added to each cupcake, followed by a dusting of cocoa and cinnamon (this time I did actually dust them, I remembered all too well how to properly dust from my apple butter filled cupcakes). Then I put a coffee bean on each cupcake and shaved some chocolate over them...I think next time we get furniture from Ikea, I'm making these while Mirko puts the furniture together. I'm curious to see who finishes first.

I'm probably making them sound like more of a nightmare than they are. They are actually really fun to make and well  worth the effort. They are super delicious. So delicious, and so fun, that I made them again.