Strawberry cheesecake forever......

I love cheesecake, but I'm always nervous about baking it. I've prepared a few cheesecakes, and almost all of them turned out great. Every once in a while I have a flop. For some reason their process just intimidates me! That's crazy, right? Why would a type of food be intimidating? Well...it just IS. You know what else is intimidating? Pie crust. Yup....I have a billion of those "no fail" pie crust recipes in my kitchen, but I'm afraid of them. My husband loves pie, but I am scared of the crust, so I don't make it...then he gets no pie. That makes him sad. What else scares me? FRYING. Yeah....hot oil scares the heebie jeebies out of me. Well, it's not that I'm afraid of the oil (unless it splatters and burns me) it's the actual frying part. I mean, if the oil is too hot, the outside burns, the inside is raw....if the oil is to cool, then the stuff doesn't cook right. I'm just not comfortable enough with myself to successfully fry something.

Okay....getting back to the point I initially started on....cheesecake. It's good, and intimidating....so how about we make a cupcake version instead? There are a few different cupcake-cheesecake recipes I'd like to try, but this one was the first. It wasn't tough..and really, the cheesecake part of it is the frosting, so actually, it was easy.

PLUS to take this baby over the top, I filled it with some strawberry-rhubarb jam. Mmmm....delish!

Strawberry-Rhubarb Cheesecake Cupcakes
Inspired by Doughmesstic

For the cupcake:
3 c cake flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1 vanilla bean, split and scraped
1 c unsalted butter, room temperature
2 c sugar
5 eggs
1 1/4 c buttermilk
2 tsp vanilla extract

For the frosting:
1 c unsalted butter, room temperature

8 oz cream cheese, softened

4 1/2 c powdered sugar
2 tsp vanilla
1-2 tsp water, if needed

For filling:

Strawberry-Rhubarb jam (I found this at my local farmers market, but if you can't find this, I'm sure that just Strawberry jam will work, too)

For the garnish:
Strawberries, halved

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees, and line cupcake pans with liners.

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. Scrape your vanilla bean into your mixer, and cream seeds and butter together, for about 4 minutes, until light and creamy. Scrape down your bowl, and mix for another 2 minutes, or so. Slowly add sugar to butter, about 1/4 c at a time, scraping bowl as needed. Add eggs, one at a time to mixer bowl, making sure that they incorporate well. Once eggs are mixed in, add vanilla and beat for another minute, until everything looks incorporated. Set mixer to low, and begin alternately adding dry's and buttermilk into mixer bowl....starting and ending with the drys. Once mixed in, switch off mixer and mix with a spatula, to ensure all is blended in.

Grab your scooper, and scoop batter into your cupcake pans, filling about 2/3 full. Bake for 18 minutes, or until tops bounce back when touched. Cool in the pans for about 7 minutes, then remove to rack to finish cooling.

While they cool, make your frosting!

Combine butter, cream cheese, and vanilla in mixer, and beat with paddle attachment, until smooth, which for me was about 2 minutes. Making sure mixer is on low, add powdered sugar, about 1/4 c at a time. If frosting is too stiff, add a few drops of water.

To assemble these beauties, I cored them out, and filled them with the jam. If you don't have a corer, you can use one of the filling frosting tips, and squeeze some filling in center of each cupcake. If you are squeezing it in, squeeze until cupcake looks like it's cracking and going to explode. If coring, then just fill the hole. Once your cupcakes are filled, pipe your cheesecake frosting to cover hole, and garnish with a strawberry.