Cheesecake-stuffed cupcakes: There was an attempt

 I think someone booby-trapped their recipe box.

Black Bottom Chips Heat oven to 350°. Place paper liners in a cupcake pan. Combine and set aside: 1 c cream cheese ⅓ c sugar 1 egg ⅛ tsp salt 1 c chocolate chips Sift together: ½ c flour 1 c sugar 1 tsp salt ¼ c cocoa 1 tsp baking soda Add: 1 c water ½ c cooking oil 1 tsp vinegar 1 tsp vanilla Beat. Fill muffin pan cups one third full with the batter. Top with a heaping tsp cream cheese batter. Sprinkle with: sugar chopped almonds Bake 30-35 minutes. Source: Handwritten card

It looks pretty innocent, doesn't it? In theory, someone wrote out a recipe for cupcakes with a bit of cheesecake in the middle. That's a hard premise to argue with, is it not? 

This recipe gets even more enticing when you give it a closer look. We're not making a plain cheesecake (which is of course delicious) for this recipe. We are making chocolate cupcakes with chocolate chip cheesecake in the middle. 

The cheesecake batter was deliriously delicious. At this point, I was telling myself that no, you can never go wrong when you pick a handwritten recipe. Someone made it enough to warrant putting it into the recipe box. Granted, it's hard to make a bad cheesecake. But it's easy to make an underwhelming one, and this tasted like it would be fantastic.

At this point, we set the cheesecake aside and make the cake batter. I actually wasn't sure whether this recipe would make chocolate cake or chocolate cookie dough. I also knew that it wouldn't matter. This would be delicious either way.

This is where the recipe ruins itself. We have all our sifted dry ingredients in the bowl. In theory, we just need to add the fluids and we will be done. However, we ended up with a hopelessly watery chocolate-flavored mess.

I checked, re-checked, and reread the recipe card to see if I had made a terrible measuring error. I did not. 

This recipe thinks our "cake batter" should be as runny as the tap water we put into it. But, as I reminded myself, someone carefully handwrote this entire recipe out. Furthermore, they didn't just scribble it onto a random paper scrap. They wrote this on a pink index card, which they then put into the recipe file. Note that they even purchased the recipe box that comes with a lid.

Approach this box with caution, apparently.

I did my best to keep an open mind while finishing the recipe. After all, when you make a new recipe, it's not supposed to look like everything you've already made. That's the whole point of making a new recipe instead of bringing one of your standbys out again. 

Besides, you never know when a recipe will go right. The first time I made that tomato soup chocolate cake that periodically pops up on the reposting rounds, it looked wrong before I baked it. After the cake turned out unexpectedly perfect, I subjected it to the hardest recipe test: serving it to people without telling anyone what's in it. No one suspected anything, and the whole cake was polished off. With this recipe, I ignored how un-bake-ably runny the cake batter looked and thought that perhaps a sweet surprise awaited. I thought maybe this isn't cake batter but more of a chocolate baked custard. To my own surprise, the cheesecake didn't sink upon landing in the chocolate water.

At first, things smelled promising as the cupcakes began to bake. I even dared to leave the kitchen and let them cook unattended. I came back to check on the oven and decided to hold off on taking out the trash.

How could this happen? As aforementioned, this is a handwritten recipe. Someone presumably got it to work as written. Either that, or someone left a delayed-action prank in the recipe box. If you look closely, you can see that the cupcakes are still in a liquid state under that lava-rock crust. I've never had cake burn without hardening first.

I was too hopeful with this recipe. At first, I thought the too-long baking time was to allow the unusually watery cake batter time to set. Then, for the first half of the baking time, things seemed to go well. The batter rose up and subsumed the cream cheese. "Ah!" I thought. "The cream cheese turns into a surprise in the middle!" When the batter overflowed the pans, I blamed not the recipe but myself for overfilling the cups. After all, the recipe clearly said to fill them one-third of the way up.

 I only let them bake for the full time to see if the cream cheese parts were any good. Unfortunately, they were coated in cake tar. Also, they looked like little mottled grubs when you fished them out on a spoon.

I am so glad I used those little paper cupcake liners for this. Can you imagine trying to get this off of a bare pan? 

Well, half of the recipe may be worthless, but the idea had potential. Cupcakes with cheesecake in the middle sound like a match made in bliss. As we still had a lot of cheesecake batter in the refrigerator, we only needed to get out a chocolate cake recipe we actually liked. This brings us to the Wacky Cake, which has made numerous appearances in our house since Freezy sent us the recipe. You'll note that the cake batter actually looks like cake batter instead of brown water.

See how (unlike the first time) the cake batter doesn't lie completely flat in the pan? Yeah, this is how cake batter is supposed to act.

And so, we dropped little spoonfuls of cheesecake into each cup of batter, set them in the oven, and found delicious success very soon thereafter.

 They look alluringly marbled, don't they?

In full disclosure, I must note that some of them sank in the middle. However, you could easily conceal that with a bit of whipped cream or a little candlelight.

And so, having finally gotten this recipe to turn out as intended, we tried one of these delicious chocolate cheesecupcakes. 

And... they're not bad. However, they're definitely not as good as the cake or the cheesecake would have been had we baked them separately. You might think that cake and cheesecake go together like apple pie and cheese, but they were just pointlessly heavy and rich. No one thought these cupcakes were bad, but no one wanted seconds either. 

But you know what barely lasted long enough for me to set the serving platter on the countertop? The small cake I made with the extra batter. 

Even though no one liked these cupcakes, I didn't want to waste them. I decided to turn the cupcakes into cookies instead.

I put them into a bowl, smushed them into a paste, cracked in an egg and a bit of baking powder, and hoped for the best. And dare I say, I got what I hoped for. I called them "once in a lifetime cookies" because I don't think I'd deliberately make a batch of disappointing cupcakes just so I could mash them into cookie dough again.

But these cookies, while absolutely delicious, seemed like they needed a crowning touch. With that in mind, I made some ganache to put on top of them. It seems like everyone who bakes on social media cranks out gallons of ganache to dump on top of everything that comes out of the oven. And so, we mixed milk (since we didn't have cream on hand) and chocolate chips, ready for the microwave.

After a few rounds of stopping and stirring, the ganache was beautiful, creamy-dreamy, and ready to launch an Instagram career.

As I've seen so many people do on social media, I crowned each cookie with a big chocolate blob. This is the easiest icing job I've ever done besides just pouring glaze on everything. They looked just like the cookie recipe on the back of the baking chocolate box.

 However, while everyone agreed that the cookies were delicious, everyone agreed that the ganache, while appropriate for someone's social media profile, it was as overwhelming as piling an entire can of frosting on top of each one. 

It made me think of something I've noticed about the current, most up-to-date baking on social media. People trying to make the top posts of Instagram have been competitively making their chocolate thicker, darker, richer, and heavier. I think this has finally reached its peak. I've seen a steady increase in the number of people muttering that they don't want to eat these artistic-looking black bricks of chocolate. These cookies may look up-to-date, but no one liked the way I had dressed them.

I ended up scraping most of the ganache off so that we could enjoy the cookies. However, they looked rather... battle-scarred.

This brings us to an unexpected new cookie-decorating implement: the heat gun! You know, those things that are basically high-intensity hairdryers that you're not supposed to ever point at yourself? We melted the remaining ganache into a passable chocolate glaze in less than 45 seconds.

All right, so they don't look nearly as good as they did before I removed most of the icing. But they tasted a lot better this way. The remaining thin layer of chocolate was a lovely finishing touch to the cookie instead of an overwhelming wad of chocolate.

Also, I baked the last of the cheesecake batter in a little pan. And it's a damn good chocolate chip cheesecake. If I'm feeling a bit extravagant, I may make it in little cupcakes lined with chocolate cookie crumbs.

In conclusion, the cheesecake in this recipe is good. The cake is good if you throw it out and use a different recipe. But the two of them are not stronger when put together. I would bake them in separate pans.