Cheese Cupcakes Trial and Recipe (from Meiji's Website)

A screenshot of the recipe selection page at meiji's website. So there are recipes for soups, mousses, cakes, desserts, and all other kinds of treats. 

For people who love to cook and can read in Japanese, going to Meiji's (the confectionery company) website  is great as there are over a hundred recipes for all sorts of dishes, from savory dishes to all sorts of sweets and cakes. What I like is that the website is Japanese but a lot of the recipes are western in nature, with a lot of the recipes having cream and cheese.

But I guess what intrigued me the most was their recipe for cheese muffins. This is because my mom has a weird fixation over  cheese muffins. While I care about ice cream, she cares about cheese muffins. My mom and I are on this mini quest to find the best recipe ever for cheese muffins-- we want the kind of muffins that are moist, cheesy, and not too sweet. We just want the perfect muffin.  

So I try out their recipe for Camembert Cheese Muffins. For those who can read Japanese, just click on the link. But to those who can't, I'll provide a skeleton translation soon. 

The English recipe for these muffins is as follows: 

Ingredients: 

100 g  Cake flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

75 g of Camembert cheese

1 medium sized egg

35g Unsalted Butter

60g Granulated Sigar

60mL (1/4 cup) milk

Pre-Bake Directions: 

-Butter should be left out until it reaches room temperature

-Pre heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius or 356 degrees Farenheit

-Mix the baking powder and the flour together and sift it 

Bake Proper: 

1.) Get 40g of the Camembert Cheese and put it into a food processor. Use the food processor to turn the cheese into paste form. Slice the other 35 g of cheese into 6 portions to be used as topping later on.

2.) In a bowl, put in the butter. Whip it with a mixer at low speed until creamy. Add in the cheese paste (from step 1) and add in the granulated sugar. Whip until fluffy and all. 

3.) Beat the egg, and add it into the batter (in step 2) in 3 or 4 batches while the mixer is at low speed.  Then add in the flour mixture, then add in the milk in 3 batches.

4.) Put in the batter into their respective muffin cases or liners. Add in the topping onto the batter in the muffin cases. Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes. 

So this is the translated recipe hastily written on a sheet of index card. 

35 g of butter is really just a small amount. I think it's even less than 1/4 cup! 

This is the sugar on the digital weighing scale my mom owns. Well, I do find her scale outdated as it cannot do any decimal digits, it's big, and it's electricity operated. Now, it's easy to find a battery operated digital scale that is 1/3 the size but capable of doing the same things! Wahhhh 

This is the cake flour that we have. 

So this is my cheese paste. I didn't use Camembert cheese, but instead, used a generic pasteurized cheese bar that we readily had at home. 

That's the butter while whipping. 

And this is how the mixing bowl looks like after I've transferred most of the batter onto the muffin cases. 

And these are my muffin cases. I was able to yield 7 muffins out of this mix, but I guess that's because these muffin cases are smaller than the conventional ones. 

All in all this is the final product. Notice the burnt cheese XD I left them in the oven for too long I guess.

 Okay so all in all, I think this recipe is good. The product came out tasting like butter cake with a little hint of cheese. It was moist, it wasn't too sweet, and the texture was good. I just have to note that the next time somebody does this, it would be better if they can control the oven settings so that only the lower oven heater is turned on and not the upper to avoid the cheese topping from burning. The cheese was burnt on top, but the cake itself was just perfectly cooked, so yeah, be careful about the cheese.