For the 2012 Cinema Brittahytta season premiere summer barbecue, I made Brownie Briquettes, glowing charcoal coals devil’s food mini square cupcakes using marshmallow creme and orange crystal sugar! They must have been realistic, since many people walked right past them, and one asked me why there were two sets of hot coals going! 
Erica has been recently going mad for cupcakes with many clever ideas, and on Facebook she posted her black velvet cupcakes served in a foil-lined bowl with tongs several months ago, but they looked like plain unlighted charcoal. I told her I wanted to make them more realistic, with powdered sugar “ash” and especially glowing coals!
First step is to find a square baking pan. I found a tiny 24-hole “brownie bites” silicone pan by Wilton for $10 at Michaels then I used a coupon of course. I think a slightly larger pan would be better since these are very shallow holes so make a bite-size briquette. The bonus is that you get over 60 mini cupcakes out of one batch of cake batter! Fudgy dense brownies do not rise enough to get the slight dome shape of a briquette, so I used a devil’s food cake mix with black food coloring added as “cakelike brownies.” If you’re against food coloring, you could try leaving them brown but I don’t think the illusion is as good since they still look like brownies that way.
Erica’s black velvet cupcakes nicely cracked on top looking exactly like charcoal. Mine however never cracked, none of my 5 dozen at all! So I had to crack them open myself, carefully not cracking all the way through the bottom of the thin cupcake, so I could pipe white marshmallow creme inside so the orange crystal sugar would show up nicely. You could use white frosting instead, but I liked the s’mores reference using marshmallow and chocolate as coals.
If you use frosting that sets, make sure you add the sugar crystals while the frosting is still tacky. The marshmallow creme stays nice and sticky so you can pipe a bunch in a row, then add the sugar in assembly line fashion. An unexpected bonus was that the stray orange crystals that stuck to the top of the cake looked like coals glowing through charcoal texture even without white behind them!
You also need some briquettes that have ashed over, so powdered sugar is the obvious choice. However, just dusting them with powdered sugar looks like normal food, so I rubbed the sugar into the cupcake that made it nice and mottled gray. My cupcakes were so moist that I expected the powdered sugar to soak in & need to be redone right before serving, but I didn’t expect all the marshmallow and orange to soak in completely in just 36 hours! Fair warning, decorate these a few hours before serving! I had to redo all mine as I arranged them.
Arranging is up to you. Erica lined a large round bowl with foil, used a cooling rack on top and had tongs, which was enough to suggest a barbecue. I was lucky still to have my old apartment balcony tiny tabletop grill in my shed, so I cleaned it up, lined it with foil, and arranged my Brownie Briquettes inside. I set the plain black ones haphazardly around the outside edges like they hadn’t caught fire yet, then ashy ones, then the glowing ones in the middle so I had a pile of charcoal just like before you spread out the coals for grilling. I gave a final dusting of powdered sugar over everything so it looked more natural pile of charcoal glowing coals. Of course I had clean BBQ tongs, but since the grill grates didn’t come very clean, I set them to the sides for display only. No one expected this to be a dessert, so they kept walking by it, and one person who came later asked why there were two sets of hot coals going! hahaha…now that’s success!
Not only a successful dessert, but a successful premiere as well! After a whole season with no Rock Band outside, 13 of us plus one dog had a good game going while waiting for enough darkness to watch the first Men In Black in honor of MIB3 opening last week. While they were playing songs I didn’t know how to sing, I took a billion photos trying to get one of my glowing coal brownies in front of the real glowing coals. You can check out those photos in the full gallery if you click below. Hooray for summer!
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