BBQ Grill Cupcakes Recipe and Tutorial - A Mom's Impression (2024)

Recently Updated! These Fun Father’s Day Cupcakes are the perfect treat to celebrate dad! Decorated to look like grills, they are super cute and delicious!

Why You Will Love This Recipe

• FUN – The dad in your life will get a total KICK out of these cupcakes! We make the caramel look like a pork chops on the grill! And hot tamales are the hotdogs. The gumdrops are Shish Kabobs!
• EASY – We use a store bought cake mix to make our cupcakes. But you can use your own homemade recipe if you want. From there, it just a couple of simple steps to decorate them. We will walk you through the whole process.

Fathers Day Cupcakes

I have made these BBQ Grill Cupcakes as brownies and as chocolate cupcakes. Either way, they turn out yummy and everyone loves them! I found these in a magazine a few years ago and I just had to make them for Father’s Day, but they would be perfect for a summer BBQ or party as well! Here is what you’ll need to get started:

• CHOCOLATE CAKE MIX (and all ingredients to make it: eggs, oil, etc…) – You can use any kind of cake mix you’d like. Vanilla, White, Lemon or confetti.
• BLACK ICING – I used the tube of black from Wilton. But you can use whatever brand you want.
• ORANGE DECORATING SUGAR – These will be your “hot coals”.
• CARAMEL CREAMS – Cut them in half to make them look like pork chops on the grills!
• GUM DROPS – We used red, yellow and orange gumdrops to look like the shish-kabobs.
• HOT TAMALES CANDIES – Hotdogs!

Other Fun Cupcake Toppings

Making the candy food was my favorite part. I love turning food into unexpected things and this was a fun one! After making the caramel pork chops, hot dogs, and kabobs, I started thinking about all the other candy food I could make. The caramels could be great hamburgers or cheeseburgers. You could get some gummy fish to put grill marks on. The ideas keep flowing!

You can also, frankly, just get some fondant of various colors (brown for hamburger patties, yellow for cheese, bacon, etc.) And then you can shape them into whatever your dad likes to grill!

How To Make Father’s Day Grill Cupcakes

1. Place cupcake liners (I used the silver ones to help mimic a grill) in a cupcake pan, and fill them two-thirds full of your favorite brownie batter or chocolate cake batter.
2. Bake according to the recipe directions.
3. Sprinkle with orange decorators sugar and then let cool completely to room temperature.
4. Attach a round size 3 tip onto your tube of black icing. Or you can simply put your black icing into a sandwich bag and snip off the corner.
5. Pipe grate lines onto each brownie and let them sit for 20 minutes.
6. Prepare the grill food as instructed below and press it in place atop each brownie:
7. Kebabs = A caramel cream and red, yellow, and green gumdrops, cut into small pieces + toothpick skewers
8. Porkchop = one-half of a caramel cream, molded with fingers + black food coloring, applied with a toothpick
9. Hot dogs = Hot Tamales candies + black food coloring, applied with a toothpick

Notes, Tips and FAQs

• KID FRIENDLY RECIPE – This is a great dessert recipe for the kids to help out on. It could be a great gift from the little ones!
• FROSTING – We didn’t put any frosting on these cupcakes, but you certainly could. Maybe use orange frosting to make it look more like coals under the grill.

Items To Help With This Recipe

• WIRE RACK
• ELECTRIC MIXER
• MIXING BOWLS

These adorable cupcakes would be perfect for cookouts, July 4th, Memorial Day, Labor Day or for a special someone on their birthday.

Happy Father’s Day!

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