Swirlicious Cheesecake Cupcakes

I get a lot of ideas of foods to try from pinterest.com, mostly because I am surfing it often. This makes me bound to run across tons of delicious food items. Raspberry Swirl Cheesecake Cupcakes is one of these amazing finds. It originated from a blog named Annie's Eats. I nearly died after looking at the pictures, so I went straight to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients. 

I should have taken more pictures, but it was just so darn hot in the kitchen that I wanted to make them as soon as I could (sorry to our family and friends in Texas, I know it's hotter there!).

I grinded up graham crackers, and mixed that up with some butter to create the graham cracker crust, and layered that in the cupcake pans. They had to bake for about 5 minutes in the oven at 325 degrees, but you can definitely smell when they are done. 

The filling was pretty darn easy, too. Zach mixed up some cream cheese, sugar, vanilla, salt, and eggs. After the cheese filling goodness was done, we made the raspberry swirliciousness. In the food processor went raspberries, and sugar, then we strained it to get the seeds out. I imagine it doesn't matter if you leave the seeds in, but I thought it looked prettier without them. 

On top of the cupcakes goes a few dots of the raspberry stuff, and we swirled it around to get that tie-dyed effect. This part was pretty fun!

Zach accidentally made hearts! So cute.

So, I have never made cheesecake before, and I am guessing timing is everything when it goes into the oven? Because I had some issues. Zach put the first 2 trays of the cupcakes in the oven, and we cooked them for 22 minutes, as the recipe suggested. I don't know what we were thinking, because our oven runs hot so we always take things out early. But we didn't, and the cheesecake cupcakes got a little charred on the edges. Which was fine. But then as they cooled, they sunk in the middle! We taste-tested them, and they tasted a tiny, tiny bit charred, but still delicious. With the third pan, we set the time to 18 minutes, and they came out perfectly!

You can see the difference in the two batches in the picture below. The cupcake on the left in the white paper is perfectly done, and the two on the right, not so much. I don't know that this was a cooking failure, but there was definitely a lesson learned here! 

Luckily, Zach was having a meeting the next day with his Thermoelectrics group, so he brought them with him. I guess people liked them (even the funny looking ones) because Zach only came home with a few leftover! Maybe they just ate them to be nice? Haha, no, but seriously, they are sooo good and rich and amazing. Cheesecake is such a dense dessert, and the cupcake size is just the right amount. 

Here's the breakdown of the cost and calories. 

Cost

I am not as fancy as Zach with my cost analysis, so here it is dumbed down. My bill at the store was $20 (already had vanilla on hand, though, and only used a third of the graham crackers I bought). We got 36 cupcakes out of the ingredients, and that comes to about... hold on let me get a calculator... 56 cents per cupcake. Not too shabby, I guess? I don't know, but dude, it was totally worth it!

Calories

I plugged all of the calories into a calorie counter, and it came out to 187 calories per cupcake. This is a pretty great number considering all the cream cheese packed into each cupcake! 

Yes, now it's your turn, go make these! They're so good!