Cheesecake-Filled Cupcakes

These were supposed to be Black Bottom Cupcakes, but something funny happened in the heat of my oven. Essentially all of the cream cheese filling I had carefully dolloped in the midst of my cupcakes was overpowered and encased by rising cupcake dough. The cupcakes depicted are actually a minority, the resolute few whose cheesecake filling refused to be wholly submerged in a tide of rising dough. I thought they’d photograph better than the others, which look exactly like regular chocolate cupcakes with sunken tops. This sunken-ness is typical of all black-bottom cupcakes and is a design feature rather than a flaw.

That these resulted in a cheesecake filling, rather than topping, was a bit of a pleasant surprise. These cupcakes, for example, lend themselves to frosting far more readily than do their traditional black-bottomed counterparts. The cheesecake in the middle is like the malt filling in the whopper, the caramel sandwiched between cookie and chocolate in the Twix. It’s the delightful hidden surprise. Really, I think them far nicer because one doesn’t realize (unless one happened to bake them) that a plain, slightly sunken chocolate shell conceals vast reservoirs of cheesecake. Or proto-cheesecake. Cheesecake-like substance.