Butter Cheese Cupcakes

I made Butter Cheese Cupcakes last night.

Been wondering what it would taste like when I found the recipe on the Internet. I do not remember which blog it was. Credit to the original recipe owner.


What I like about it is the ingredients are not complicated at all. Only 5 main items.

Butter Cheese Cake

Ingredients:

160g butter
100gm cream cheese
200gm castor sugar
5 eggs
210gm self-raising flour
(vanilla extract optional)

Method:

1. Cream butter till soft.
2. Add cream cheese and beat thoroughly into the butter.
3. Add castor sugar little by little. I used a steel strainer to break down the sugar that had lumped.
4. Add egg one at a time and mix through. I added in a bit of vanilla extract so it wouldn't smell too egg-y.
5. Add the flour through a sifter to reduce lumps.
6. Mix well. I hand-mixed my batter from the start because I was making only 3/5 of the recipe.

My baking time was 20mins at 180deg Celcius in my electric oven. The above amount is enough for an 8" pan.

Mind you, I only heated the oven barely 1 min before popping the cuppies in. Many recipes ask you to heat the oven first before preparing the batter. I'm not too fussy about following recipes strictly. I mean, we can always add more time later if we want browner bakes, can't we?

Btw, talking about 'mixing well', I am now a bit wary about the term as I had bad experiences beating batters 'well'. At the time, I was using all-purpose flour. My cake turned out hard and chewy. So hard that it could be categorized into what my mother would say as, "If you throw this and it hit a dog, the dog will die (of trauma xD)". After some searching on the Internet, some bakers informed that overly beating a batter will develop the gluten in the flour just like making bread. They said that flour needs only to be folded in or mixed lightly. So, that's what happened huh?



I used medium-sized #8 papercup for this particular baking session. I'm not sure what's the grading code for other countries. That's the size written on the label when I bought them from the cake supply shop. The size is about 3cm(height) x 4.5cm (bottom width) x 5.5cm (upper width). I filled the cups up to the max. If you intend to decorate it, better fill in 2/3 cup max. I made these just to eat. So, overflown cuppies were fine.



The verdict?

I love the taste of the cake. The texture was soft and moist enough. Since the cream cheese was not as much as the amount in full-blown cheesecakes, the taste sometimes come across as vanilla cupcakes with very thick soured milk in them. You get the hint of cheesy taste and smell but not that heavy.

I was a bit concerned about the amount of sugar at first but with the cheese and eggs, the sweetness was pretty light. You can certainly frost these cuppies with buttercream. I am not too keen on overly sweet recipes because it will be too overwhelming to decorate with buttercream later. Fresh cream is great tasting but the shelf life is too short.

So, yes. This one may enter my list of "repeat offender".....ha....ha..