OmNomNom: Gooey Chocolate & Cream Cheese Cupcakes

One of my goals for September was to bake three new recipes! I love baking, but often feel like I fall into the rut of only baking the same few things. I recently did a giant recipe cleanout, and saved only three baking cookbooks (and of course my personal handwritten one!). At the beginning of the week I had my hubby and our neighbor page through them and mark the recipes they’d like me to try. I love having people to make food for!

My first recipe pick was from this book. Our neighbor’s birthday was yesterday so I figured it was fitting to make his choice of cupcake!

He selected Gooey Chocolate & Cream Cheese Cupcakes. It’s kind of hard to go wrong with that title.

They came out great! I am actually not a huge cream cheese fan in baking (something about sweet cheese just rubs me the wrong way), but these were really tasty. The gooey cream cheese topping isn’t too sweet the way some cream cheese frostings can be, and it went really well with the chocolate cupcake. I think the one thing that could have improved them would have been to remove than from the oven five minutes earlier than I did. The recipe called for 20 – 25 minutes, and at 20 minutes I couldn’t tell if they were done (the toothpick maneuver is out for these particular cupcakes as they are supposed to be gooey in the center!), so I stuck them in for five minutes more. I shouldn’t have. They weren’t overdone by any means, but I think they’d have had a better texture without that last five.

The recipe pic is hard to read, so here’s the recipe if you’d like to try it!

Gooey Chocolate & Cream Cheese Cupcakes

Ingredients:

Generous 1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
Scant 1/4 cup baking cocoa
3/4 tsp baking soda
1 cup superfine sugar*
4 tbl sunflower oil (I just used veg oil)
3/4 cup water
2 tsp white vinegar
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
2/3 cream cheese (I used neufchatel cheese)
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (dark would be good too)

*You can easily make superfine sugar by putting regular sugar in a food processor for 1 – 2 minutes. That’s how I always make mine.

Preheat the oven to 350F. Line a muffin tin with liners (the recipe says it makes only twelve, by mine made fourteen so prepare for extra).

Sift the flour, cocoa, and baking soda into a medium bowl. Stir in 3/4 cups of the sugar. Add the oil, water, vinegar, and vanilla, then stir until well combined.

Place the remaining sugar, cream cheese, and egg in large bowl and beat together until well mixed. (Although I usually make things by hand, I definitely recommend using a hand electric mixer for this – beating cream cheese is a pain!) Once well mixed, stir in the chocolate chips.

Spoon the cake batter into paper liners and top each with a spoonful of cream cheese batter (I filled mine very full as these don’t rise a ton). Bake in the preheated oven for 20 – 25 minutes (definitely 20!). Transfer to a wire rack and let cool.

Enjoy!

Definitely deliciously decadent. That gooey topping is just so great, especially with the melted chocolate chips in there. So good warm out of the oven!