Key Lime Pie Cupcake Extravaganza!

The Backstory:

This past weekend I had the perfect opportunity to take on my first baking challenge. Ever since he moved into his new apartment here on campus, The Boyfriend has had this intense urging to throw a house(apartment?)warming party. His friends all have very eager appetites (understatement), so I figured what better opportunity than this one to have my food experiment. One concern I had to begin with was that the recipe requires quite a number of different ingredients, which can be a bit stressful to those on a budget who can't really afford to get a number of things that they may only use just once. Luckily, I already some of the things I needed. However, I also made a couple of personal changes. For one, I opted out of the coconut flavoring, just because it was ridiculously priced at Food Lion and The Boyfriend suggested it may not make a significant difference...Maybe if I redo it I'll try to throw that in, but they were delicious regardless. Secondly, while the recipe suggests blackberry jam for the frosting, I decided to go with strawberry fruit preserves. Strawberry just sounded like it would go deliciously with the lime flavoring, and as The Boyfriend mentioned, that combination seems to work just peachy in mixed drinks, so I went with it. Anywho, with those suggestions in mind, here's the recipe below:

Ingredients:
1 tsp lime zest
2 tbs lime jce
1 lg egg
3 lg egg yolks
1 white cake mix
1 pkg (3oz)vanilla instant pudding
1 1/4 c water
1/3 cup oil
1 tsp coconut flavoring
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1/3 cup key lime juice
2 (8oz) pkg cream cheese
1/2 stick of butter
2 lg spoonfuls of blackberry jam
powdered sugar 3 to 4 cups

Directions:
1) Put the whole egg and yolks, cake mix, pudding(dry),water,
oil, coconut flavoring, zest, 2table juice. mix for 2 to 3 min. spoon into cupcake liners. bake app 15 to 18 min at 350. cool 5 min.
2) Make the filling of sweetened condensed milk and lime juice. Stir until thickened and squeeze some into each cupcake from the top. Cool.
3)Prepare the cream cheese frosting. add the jam to your liking. spread on top.

How It All Turned Out:

The cupcakes turned out amazingly, but with a few bumps. First of all, I accidently confused the fact that the butter was supposed to be for the frosting and not the batter...so the cupcakes themselves were a bit more chewy than expected. Also, the tops caved in a few minutes after taking them out to cool :( My roommate, who is also very into baking, mentioned that overmixing the batter sometimes causes the caving effect, so in all I learned two things: Pay attention to the order of the ingredients, and don't overmix!!

Slightly overmixed batter...woops!

Mixing the filling was easy enough, but another difficulty was figuring out how to actually put it into the cupcakes. I don't have a cupcake plunger, but Rachel mentioned that she sometimes uses a peeler to carve out the sections in the middle of the cupcakes to put the filling in. I did the same, and while it wasn't exactly neat it got the job done, and I had plenty of willing subjects (my lovely roommates) to eat the cupcake bits for me. I covered the holes with the frosting, which was my favorite part, and voila! The strawberry jam was definitely a good choice, and definitely don't leave out the lime zest, as it added a really nice effect. I got great reviews from The Boyfriend's very hungry and slightly tipsy friends that were at the party, but happily my more sober friends also loved them. I kept reminding everyone to take very big bites to get the full effect of the filling and the frosting together. All in all, a slightly difficult but very rewarding experience. I've already gotten demands for more and will repeat very soon!

As for my next challenge, I'm hoping for something involving peanut butter...I've had an immense craving and can't wait to see what Rach comes up with for me!