I stole this idea from here. Before that it seems to have made the rounds.  And why not? It’s such a fun twist on cakes and cupcakes and the results are luscious.  I knew from the start this was going to be something legendary because it reminded me of a friend’s mother’s special pumpkin bread.  She baked and delivered them in a particular size coffee can which she doled out sparingly and demanded be returned to her.

I bought a few curved small mason jars at the Container store just to give this a go.  If you’d rather not eat the cakes directly from the jars (though that’s more than half the fun) you’ll need straight sided jars.

The first time I tried this out I made chocolate pudding cakes from a retro dessert cookbook.  However it was too hard to split the various layers meant to be made in one large baking dish into the smaller jars and the pudding part didn’t come out right.  But the cake part was still tasty.  I think with some tweaking a recipe like that, meant to be served warm and gooey, would be perfect for the jars.  The second and third times I just made a basic vanilla batter and a basic butterscotch batter.  The result as you can see at the top was a nice crusty top with a warm moist center.  They were perfect eaten hot right out of the jars.

Next time I move on to pies in jars.  Idea stolen from here.