For this recipe, we cooked our cake and bacon on the Grilla Grills Silverbac. First, make sure your grill is good and clean. You want to cook your cake first to avoid any “off” flavors getting transferred to your cake from left over grease or bad smoke. Bring your grill to 350 degrees.

Next, we made our cupcakes. We used a box cake mix to make some yummy yellow cupcakes. Instead of following the traditional directions on the box, add some substitutions to really up your box cake mix game. Substitute the water for milk; add an extra egg and substitute melted butter for oil but double the amount. For this recipe we added one-cup milk, 4 eggs and 1 cup melted butter. You want to mix these ingredients until they are just mixed together. Next, we use a large ice cream scoop to scoop out even amounts of batter into our paper cupcake liners. Once the cupcake tin is filled, they are ready to go on the grill. Check them in approximately 20 minutes. Remember to try to leave the grill closed as long as possible so your cakes won’t sink in the middle. Once they are done, bring them in to cool and reduce your grill temp to 300 degrees to get ready to cook the bacon.

For the bacon: ½ cup Killer Hog’s The BBQ Rub ½ cup brown sugar Spread this evenly on both sides of your bacon. You want to avoid rubs with a lot of salt as your bacon will bring all the salt you need for this recipe. We cooked our bacon on a cooling rack in a metal pan. This helps the grease drip off the bacon so those sugars will caramelize and it makes for easy clean up! Put your bacon on the smoker for about 45 minutes. You will want to keep an eye on it and give it a flip about halfway through. Once it is ready, take it off and let it cool completely.

For the buttercream: First place your butter in the mixer. Then add in your sifted powdered sugar. Mix until the butter and sugar are completely combined and form a creamy texture. Next add in your maple flavoring and mixed until well incorporated. Next, add in a pinch of salt. Finally, start to add in your heavy cream. Add just a little at a time until you reach your desired consistency. We find that adding all 4 TBSP to this recipe creates a perfectly smooth and easily spreadable buttercream. Make sure to beat in your cream well and don’t forget to scrape down the sides! After everything is mixed, we like to turn the mixer on the highest speed to “whip” the buttercream until it is light and fluffy.

Now it is time to decorate. We used a 1M Wilton tip to ice our cupcakes. Starting in the center and working your way out gives you a pretty “rosette” style but starting from the outside and working your way up and to the middle gives you a delicious cloud of icing! Top it all off with a few pieces of that candied bacon.