Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcakes

So I thought it might be fun to try out a kind of cupcake that I had never done before. It is simple, but it reminds me of cheesecake, without having to go through all of the fuss to make a cheesecake. A simple vanilla cupcake batter, with a filling of fruit that has been cooked and turned into a soup-like mixture. That sounds kinds of gross, doesn't it? Well. It isn't. It tastes good. And the cupcakes, in my opinion, were a success! Oh yeah, and the part that makes them more like cheesecake is the cream cheese icing.

I'm delivering them tomorrow to my sister so my little cupcake-testers can try them out and let me know how they really are. 

Now, I was going to do these early this afternoon. I swear I had really good intentions. I bought my groceries before noon this morning (I am NOT a morning person, and would sleep until noon daily if I could). But then, I decided to read a little bit. And when I say "read", and it's a weekend day, it probably really means I'm going to nap. And, it's a truly poor idea to nap in the afternoon on a Sunday. At least for me it is. I will not be sleeping tonight. *facepalm*

Anyway, so I woke up from my nap all groggy-like, and set to work to make these cupcakes. They turned out to be a whole heck of a lot easier than I thought. I don't know why, but I expected them to explode! I think they could have used a little bit more filling. But maybe if I did that, then said explosion would have occurred. 

Strawberry Cheesecake cupcakes 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees first!

Then, you take your basic vanilla cupcake recipe. I use this one:

½ cup margarine (You could use butter, but I’m just too cheap to buy it)

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 ½ cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ cup milk

2 tsp vanilla

Cream the margarine and sugar, and add the eggs. Beat until combined.

Add in half the dry ingredients.

Add the milk.

Add the other half of the dry ingredients, and mix until it looks like cake batter.

Add in the vanilla and mix it in to the batter.

For the Strawberry Filling

Chop up half a quart of strawberries (This is really a random guess. I used what I had left in my container)

2 tbsp sugar (give or take, depending on how sweet you like it)

Add a little bit of water in the bottom of a pot. Chop the strawberries up quite small, and toss them in. Slowly bring the fruit to a boil, and then add in the sugar. Keep stirring every once in a while, and make sure it is thickening up. Test it to see if it is sweet enough, and if not add more sugar. If the fruit mixture isn’t becoming thick, dissolve cornstarch in cold water, and add it in slowly, until it thickens to your liking. It shouldn’t be too runny.  Remove from heat, (I put mine in a separate bowl) and let it cool. 

Place cupcake papers into the muffin tins, and fill the cupcake papers about ¼ - 1/3 of the way with batter. 

Put a dollop of the strawberry filling in the middle of the batter, try not to spread it too close to the edges. 

Cover it with more cupcake batter, making sure you don’t fill it too full. (10 points if you can tell what kind of cupcake papers I'm using)

Place in preheated oven for 15-20 minutes, depending on how hot your oven runs. Test with a toothpick once done, but remember your strawberry filling will come out wet regardless, you just want to make sure there is no wet cake batter.

 Make sure the cupcakes cool completely before icing them. I used a cream cheese icing. Nothing special!

1/2 cup margarine
1 block of cream cheese
3-4 cups of icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla
possibly 1 tbsp of milk (only use this if the icing is to thick. Mine wasn't)

Ice cupcakes with as much or as little icing as you want. Only make them pretty if you can. I can't.