Having literally made over 10,000 of these over the last 25 years, here's the real deal on these: forget the salt, it adds nothing and nobody can tast the difference. Don't substitue Devils cake fot this, it's not the same. Use Special Dark cocoa if you like dark chocolate. A little extra vanilla never hurts anything. The filling is the most crucial part of this and can be very tricky to master. You need to soften the cream cheese prior to mixing, set on the counter for an hour or two, DO NOT MICROWAVE. Mix the cream cheese, sugar and egg just until there are no more lumps, then add 1/2 bag of chocolate chip. Here's where most mess this up; DO NOT OVER MIX. If filling gets runny then it carmalizes on top and never "sinks" into cake. If under mixed then filling only tastes like cream cheese and cake batter taste is off. Within the first hour after cooking, batter is gooey but delicious. Following day filling firms up for a different texture(still good), but microwave for 10-15 seconds can re-gooey it for you if you like that better. Also I make 18 not 24 with exact same recipe.
Yum! Here is my $.02 about the recipe...some observations: 1) The cream cheese mixture is very runny, some previous reviews expressed concern about that, but it sets while cooking. 2) The cream cheese mixture is about twice what you need. Double the cake portion. 3) I only needed to cook them 20 minutes. 4) I got 1 dozen regular sized muffins out of the recipe (w/o doubling the cake portion). Changes: 1) I used a heaping 1/3 cup of cocoa. 2) Milk instead of water. 3) Splenda instead of sugar.
These were great, I used boxed devil's food cake mix instead of the batter for less prep time. I filled the cups half-full and then put in a mound of the cream cheese mix and then topped them off with more batter to make them like true cream-filled cupcakes. They still made 24 and took around 20 min. to bake!
I acquired this reciped in 1966 - it's a family classic but I add a 1/2 tsp. of salt to the dry mix, use white vinegar and use chopped walnuts on top. I use mini cupcake pans & two liners - 1 tbsp dark batter 1 tsp light batter 350 15 mins. Seeing that these are so rich, I just pretty them up with a dusting of powdered sugar-- no icing is necessary. They store well in the fridge and get perked up with a fresh coat of powdered sugar when holday guests pop in.
Like many other reviewers, I substituted coffee for water (and added a spoonful of dry milk powder to the flour mixture). What really made them good, though, was the spoonful of strawberry jam I dropped on the top of each before baking. Strawberry was what I had; using blackberry or plum jam could give these a sophisticated, Black Forest-type taste, and I'll try that next time--or perhaps swirling berry puree throughout the cream cheese mixture, or just dropping a frozen raspberry into the centre of each cupcake. The berry touch really 'lifts' the cupcake; I recommend it!
Very good. I substituted coffee for the water and it was excellent. I also added a little vanilla to the cream cheese mixture. I was taking them to a party so I drizzled them with a chocolate glaze just to dress them up. They looked great and tasted great too. It does make a lot of filling but I wouldn't cut that in half; I filled each half full with the chocolate mixture and used a heaping tablespoon of filling for each cupcake. I ended up with 19. The baking soda reacts to the vinegar so you really wouldn't want to omit it.
These are the BEST!!;d I used a devils food cake mix to make it even quicker and I had regular size choc. chips instead of mini ones but it turned out so delicious anyway. I had to be careful about how I lifted the cupcakes out of the tins - take a knife or spatula and try to pre-loosen the bottoms before taking them out. Next time I might try paper lining and see how that goes. Also I only had one muffin tin so I made 12 muffins and one 9" round cake. The cake also turned out excellent. Again pre-loosen the bottoms before removing the slices. Also though the cake tastes great it's not very 'pretty.' That's my food for thought....:)
These were so good! I might add orange or raspberry flavoring to the batter next time to add a hint of another flavor. Definitely use mini chocolate chips because the big ones sink to the bottom.
I did cheat by using a boxed Devils Food cake mix. The cupcakes were awesome!
Meh. The cream cheese part is yummy but the cake itself is blah. I even followed other's advice and replaced the water with coffee still blah. I've had way better black bottom cupcakes. These are very pretty though so they get a 3.
