I found a vegan chocolate cake recipe online many many moons ago that is probably the best chocolate cake recipe ever, vegan or not. It's light and fluffy, but still really good chocolate flavor and super easy to make. Honestly, you can go from pulling the bowl off the shelf to pulling the cake out of the oven in about 45 minutes, 30 minutes of which are baking time. Anyway. I use this recipe a lot. A LOT. My mom requests it at family gatherings. It's really yummy. I usually put a layer of blackberry jam in between the cake layers (because I'm nuts for blackberries) and my vegan buttercreme frosting on top. And it's yummy. You'll just have to take my word for it.
But then cupcakes became all the rage. So I figured, cupcakes are just small cakes, right? So I'll halve the cake recipe and get a dozen cupcakes out of it instead of a two layer cake, yes? Yes! Brilliant! This recipe also works as cupcakes! Except then there's nowhere to put the blackberry jam. You just get the vegan buttercreme frosting on top. Still yummy, but with the fruit, they'd be amazing.
So tonight, I tried putting a dollop (maybe half a dollop) of blackberry jam in each cupcake tin on top of the cake batter before baking them, hoping the cupcakes would bake around the jam and I'd get jam filled cupcakes with vegan buttercreme frosting on top. Sounds brilliant, right? I think my jam was too dense and my cupcake batter not dense enough, because the jam sank to the bottom of each cupcake. It's still there, and still ads some yummy, but a jam-bottom cupcake isn't as much fun as a jam-filled cupcake.
Oh well. Back to the drawing board.