• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
• Crush Oreos and set aside. You can do this with a food processor or by adding the cookies to a ziplock bag and crushing with a rolling pin. (We used 10 in the cake batter. Adjust to your liking).
• Place paper cupcake liners into the wells of your cupcake pan. (This recipe makes a total of 28 cupcakes)
• In the bowl of your mixer, add the cake mix, all purpose flour, sugar, and pudding mix. Whisk to blend.
• Add the remaining ingredients to the bowl. Mix on low speed for about 30 seconds.
• Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl as needed and mix on medium speed for two minutes.
• The batter should look well blended. Fold in the crushed Oreos.
• Scoop the batter into the lined cupcake pan. We filled each cupcake liner about ⅔ full- approximately ¼ cup each.
• Bake at 350 for approximately 18 minutes or until the cupcakes spring back when lightly touched, or an inserted toothpick can be inserted and removed with just a few moist crumbs attached.
• Remove the cupcakes from the pans soon after removing from the oven to prevent over-baking. (We usually wait 5 minutes or less).

For the Oreo Buttercream

• Crush Oreos and set aside. (We used 10 Oreos, adjust amount to your liking).
• Cream the (slightly softened) butter until smooth. Blend in the vanilla.
• Add half of the powdered sugar and most of the milk. Beat at medium speed until the powdered sugar is incorporated.
• Add remaining powdered sugar and milk and mix at medium speed another 3 to 4 minutes scraping the sides of the bowl occasionally. I slow down the mixer to very slow. (#2 on the KitchenAid) for 1 to 2 minutes. This will help eliminate air pockets in the buttercream. The texture will become very smooth.
• Crush the Oreos. We used a food processor for a finer crumb so that the frosting would spread more easily. You can also place them in a Ziplock bag and crush with a rolling pin.
• Fold Oreos into the buttercream.
• This recipe can be doubled or halved.
• Yields approximately 4 ½ cups of frosting.

Decorating the Cupcakes

• Once the cupcakes have cooled, frost the cupcakes.
• We had some variation in the size of our Oreo crumbs (since we used the ziplock bag method of crushing rather than a food processor)- and some of the crumbs were too large to pipe through a piping tip. For this reason, I loaded the frosting into a disposable piping bag and snipped away the tip with a large enough opening for some of the larger Oreo crumbs to flow through as I swirled the frosting.
• We topped each cupcake with a mini Oreo.