Fat Bottomed Cupcakes

Baking is one of my favorite pastimes, but it does have its downsides. For instance, I find that clothes that once fit me perfectly are now growing tighter and tighter. Hmm...

Add to the constant surplus of baked goods (and a lack of self-control in the face of said surplus) the fact that I now spend 9 hours a day sitting in front of a computer, and things aren't looking too good for my health. So I now have a rule- of everything that I bake (bread excluded), a good 75% must be brought to work and shared with my coworkers.

On the more healthy side, recently LA experienced some glorious, summer-like, almost hot weather, and so we took a nice long bike ride on the beach. I know my native land (the Midwest) is experiencing some frigid weather right now, so I shouldn't rub it in...but I will anyway.

So warm...

Where am I going with this? Oh yes. My coworkers probably think I'm a little weird for bringing so many baked goods to work, but I don't get any complaints, and anything I leave in the kitchen gets consumed in a matter of hours. I am even getting special requests. One of my coworkers wanted black bottom cupcakes for her birthday. Now, this is going to expose my ignorance, but I had never heard of, let alone eaten, let alone baked a black bottom cupcake before. And their name makes me think of the Queen song "Fat Bottomed Girls". But how could anyone resist something that is essentially a chocolate cupcake with a glob of cream cheese in the middle?

There were a few bumps on the road to black bottoms. The filling, which is cream cheese, chocolate chunks, sugar, and egg, was quite liquidy and did not sink in lumps into the center of the cupcake batter as it should have, but rather spread out into a layer on top of the batter. Chilling the filling for 30 minutes didn't help at all. I wonder if I added too much liquid, or if a longer chilling time would do the trick? Piping the filling into the middle of the cupcakes might work, but only if the chocolate chunks were omitted.

I used this recipe, making both mini and regular sized cupcakes, and while the results were delicious and got raves at work, I couldn't help but feel that they could have been a little better...obviously once I solve the cream cheese problem, but I also think they could be more chocolaty, and a little richer. Maybe next time I'll use my favorite chocolate cupcake recipe, and simply add a cream cheese filling.