I can feel you cringing now. Don’t worry, they’re cupcakes that look like cheeseburgers, not cupcakes made from cheeseburgers. Although I might not rule that idea out…

In honor of our Memorial Day cookout yesterday, I decided to make the counterpart to my hot dog cupcakes from last year. Here’s a recap to refresh your memory:

Variations of the hamburger (or cheeseburger, depending on your preferences) cupcake are all over the internet, so I’m certainly not the first to try it. The different components that make up the burger seem to vary but I decided to go with what I could easily pick up at the supermarket (read: no fondant) and used the following:

-Nilla Wafer cookies for the buns
-York Peppermint Patties for the meat
-Yellow Starburst candies for the cheese
-Red frosting for the ketchup
-Sesame seeds for the…sesame seeds (unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out a candy alternative for sesame seeds)

Assembling the burgers was pretty simple; the only part that took any time at all was softening the Starbursts, rolling them out flat, and then trimming them into a square. From there, all you have to do is stack the ingredients on top of one another, using a little bit of frosting in between each layer to keep them together.

Once you toss the top Nilla Wafter onto the stack, the red frosting gets squished out a little bit and looks just like the real thing.

As for the sesame seeds, I just used a little bit of water to wet the top Nilla Wafer and then dunked it straight down into a pile of seeds and then brushed off any excess. Once the cookie dried, the seeds were on there pretty good.

Once the burgers were all assembled, I made some of these cupcakes and some basic vanilla buttercream frosting and topped them with the cheeseburgers and voila! An adorable, perfect-for-a-summer-cookout dessert.

I hope you all had a nice Memorial Day!