Cooking with Annie & Alicia Contest - Halloween Cupcakes

Since Halloween is in the air, I decided to make some Halloween Cupcakes for the Cooking with Annie & Alicia contest.

I have to admit that when I mixed up the batter for the cupcakes, I had little hope that they were going to turn out like cupcakes--but I was wrong! They did indeed turn out to be very good. The finished cupcake is more like a cheesecake cupcake than an ordinary cupcake. It's not overly sweet, which is nice. There's no need to use any type of frosting on them. I used silicone baking cups and had no problems with the batter sticking to the cups.

You could easily change the color of the cheesecake and the cholate chips to represent any holiday...red coloring and cherry chips or peppermint candies for Christmas, green coloring and Andes Candies chips for St. Patricks Day, or even pink and purple coloring for Easter. ;)

Here is my version of this recipe with the few changes that I made:

Halloween Cup Cakes

Ingredients for Filling:
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, room temp.
1 egg
1/3 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 (6 ounce) package chocolate chips
orange paste food coloring

Ingredients for Cupcake Batter:
1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup water
1/3 cup oil
1 teaspoon vanilla

Instructions:Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Filling:
Beat together cream cheese, egg, sugar, and salt. Add chocolate chips.

Add paste fooding coloring to make the filling light orange. Blend well

and set aside.

Batter:
In a large bowl, sift together flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, and salt.
Stir in water, oil, and vanilla.

Fill 15 cupcake liners 1/2 full with chocolate batter.

Drop 1 heaping teaspoon of cream cheese mix on top.

Bake 30 minutes. Remove to cooling racks to cool completely.