We tried mini muffin cups, regular sized, and texas sized. We tried whole mallows, cut up ones, and marshmallow fluff. Plus we tried putting them inside the batter, on top of the batter, during the last half of baking, after baking.................. pretty much anything we could think of. We even tried squishing a mini cake between two grahams frosted with fluff.
The verdict? If you encase the mallow in batter, it mostly bakes away into the batter. If you put it on top and bake it, it blows up all huge and then loses all its air and deflates after you take it out. The best solution was a full sized marshmallow placed into the regular sized cupcake halfway thru baking. This yielded a slightly browned mallow while still holding most of its shape.
The biggest problem, surprisingly, is we couldn't get the right chocolate flavor to make it taste smore-y. We used a devil's food cake with chocolate pudding to make it more dense.... it just wasn't a strong enough chocolate flavor. I stuck with a box cake mix and canned frosting just to make it easy and concentrate on techniques of stuffing the mallow inside. We also tried putting chocolate chips inside the cakes to get more chocolate flavor. Then for the graham taste we tried straight graham crackers. Then we tried the recipe for a graham cracker topping we found on top of the box.
I still haven't tried all the different combinations yet, but overall the ones we did taste just weren't DELICIOUS. So get the real marshmallow taste you really need to put the fluff on after the fact, and then it is just a cupcake frosted with fluff.... boring. It might be tastier if I had one of those little creme brulee torch thingies to get some color on the fluff.
