Day 38 - Black Bottom Cupcakes

Monday, January 16, 2012

Today I decided to do another little baking session. My Dad was away in LA for the long weekend visiting my sister, and is coming home later tonight. I decided to bake a little home coming treat for him to enjoy after dinner.

I found a recipe for Black Bottom Cupcakes on Pinterest.com [surprise, surprise] and it originated from a blog called "Bake Me More." The cupcake is a devils food cake base with a chocolate chip cream cheese mixture dolloped on top [in place of frosting]. They looked really cute and the cream cheese mixture actually looked like hearts in the pictures from the blog.

I decided to make it easy for myself and go with the store bought cake mix - Pillsbury Devils Food Cake [always delicious]. I whipped up the batter in minutes and then started on the cream cheese mixture which was just a bar of softened cream cheese, sugar, an egg and mini chocolate chips. It called for "softened cream cheese" but apparently mine wasn't soft enough [hello impatient] and so I had a hard time getting the mixture to be really smooth. I figured it wouldn't be a problem since it was just going to get baked anyways.

Prepared cake batter

Chocolate chip cream cheese batter

 I filled the cupcake liners with a little bit of the chocolate cake batter and then dolloped the cream cheese mixture on top. I started off really heavy handed and put a bit too much cream cheese on each one. As I progressed, I scaled back on the amount of cream cheese I put on each cupcake and it seemed to look better [and more like the blog].

Cupcakes ready to bake

The cupcakes baked for about 20 minutes and didn't exactly have the heart shape cream cheese top like I had hoped. The cream cheese [since I put way too much on some of them] spread out over the top of the cupcake and although it didn't look super pretty, I was sure it would still taste delicious.

Cupcakes [with a lot of cream cheese!]

A little less cream cheese :) 

My Dad and I each sampled one after dinner and they were delightful! The cake was moist and the cream cheese added a sweet and creamy touch, which is the reason why you don't need frosting on these cupcakes.

So good!

These were so easy and yummy - just think of the varieties you can make with these... red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese on top... yum!

Stay tuned until next time :)