Black Bottom Cupcakes

You must be wondering what is "Black Bottom" cupcakes? Something black ingredients in it? Or black colour part at the bottom of cupcakes? In fact, they’re like rich fudge cupcakes at the bottom with cream cheese in the top middle. In order to participate TorviewTotonto's Black food palette's series event, I indeed cracking my head to think about what food or baking stuff is black?? Hence, I improvised this Black Bottom Cupcakes with charcoal powder mix with dark chocolate powder for this base cakes part. For your information, this original black bottom cupcake solely using cocoa powder as the base cake even though its name yields "Black"in it.

These cupcakes were dense, moist, very chocolaty and coffee taste (as I sprinkle some black coffee powder on top for decoration purposes). The filling was good too. It had more cream cheese and less egg than some other recipes, so the cream cheese  part of the cupcake was dense without being eggy.

My recipe is adapted one from Cook’s Country Cookbook

Filling:

12 oz cream cheese, not softened

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 large egg

Cake:

1 3/4 cups flour

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1 Tbsp charcoal  powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup buttermilk

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1teaspoon coffee powder (decor)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line 18 muffin tins with paper cups.
2. In a stand mixer, beat the cold cream cheese until fairly smooth. Add the sugar and beat until smooth. Add the egg and beat until incorporated.Set aside.
3. Combine the flour, cocoa, charcoal powder, baking soda and salt; mix well set aside.
4. In a mixing bowl, beat together the vegetable oil and sugar – I did this with a hand-held electric mixer, but a whisk would probably be fine. The mixture was kind of thick and grainy and didn’t hold a lot of air.
5. Mix the buttermilk and vanilla together in a cup, then add the flour mixture and the buttermilk mixture to the oil mixture alternately, stirring rather than beating, until flour is incorporated.
6. Divide the chocolate batter evenly among the muffins tins and top with a dollop of the cream cheese mixture, sprinkle black coffee powder as decoration.
7. Bake in preheated oven on center for 28-30 minutes. Cool at room temperature for about half an hour and then chill until very cold.

I'm submitting this recipe to Food palette series