Recipe Review -- Strawberry Preserve Cupcakes

This recipe comes from the cookbook "The Cupcake Bible:  More than 150 recipes for fun and delicious cupcakes" (Publications International, Ltd. 2011).  The recipe is on page 70.  It is basically a doctored up boxed strawberry cake mix and includes a small scoop of strawberry preserves in the middle of the cake.
 

Because it uses boxed mix, the recipe was very easy to make.  The only tricky part was the filling of the cupcake cups.  You put in a small amount of batter, add the preserves, and then cover with more batter.  I had a hard time figuring out how much batter to start
with, and as a result I ended up filling the cups more than I probably should have.  As a result, I only got 18 cupcakes rather than the 24 the recipe said it would yield.  I used a vanilla whipped variety of prepackaged frosting, and I topped the frosting with pink sugar.


Overall, these were not successful. They taste fine, and the strawberry preserves give it a fresher strawberry flavor than you would get from just the box mix.  The biggest problem was the filling.  In the picture in the cookbook, when you cut the cake open the preserves were intact (think of what the filling in a Hostess cupcake would look like if you cut the cake open).  However, as you can kind of see in my picture, the preserves got completely absorbed into the cake, leaving a hole.

In the end, while I will enjoy eating these, I don't think I'd make them again.  Strawberry isn't one of my favorite flavors to begin with and there just isn't the payoff from the preseves that I was hoping to get with this cake.  I'm also not sure what I could do differently to prevent the absorption of the filling.