Strawberry Cupcakes

Strawberry Cupcake

I have been looking for a strawberry cupcake recipe from scratch. I love to use my cake mixes, but sometimes you just want to put a little more "homemade" into something. I found this recipe that I thought sounded fabulous. . . and then I put my little touch onto things. Oh, and the fabulous idea for flavoring the icing. . .I am in love with that and going to use that for so many other recipes. Then I found on the "joy of baking" website a really great fruit flavored whipped cream (you have to look at the bottom of that link to see my inspiration, I tried to make that sponge cake into cupcakes, and I failed miserably at that). This whipped cream could be used for anything, a topping, a filling, just to eat:)! I really think the cupcake recipe you could change up the fruit and make an entirely different cupcake, but it would use the same foundation. I was really excited by finding it and I cannot wait to experiment with it some more. Well, now on to what I did for this batch of cupcakes. . .

The first thing I did was gather my ingredients. I had to do a little shopping for some, because while they may be common in many pantries, it wasn't in mine. This recipe doesn't use crazy ingredients, but I just don't keep seedless strawberry jam on my shelves and I needed to get fresh strawberries (and kiwis). According to the original recipe, it makes 12 cupcakes. . . I made 12 regular sized and then I had enough leftover to make about 16 mini cupcakes after I added the kiwi to it. The ingredients for the Strawberry Cupcakes will come first.

Ingredients:
2 TBSP Seedless Strawberry Jam (I used Smuckers "Simply Fruit")
1/4 cup finely diced fresh strawberries
1 1/4 cup All-Purpose flour
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup sugar
1 stick of butter (half cup)
2 eggs
1 tsp Vanilla
Pink gel dye (gotta make it look pretty)
1/3 cup milk
Strawberry buttercream icing (I will put that recipe at the end of this blog)

Strawberries & Jam

Preheat oven to 350.

Start by combining your jam and strawberries, set aside.

Sift together flour and baking powder, set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar.

Add the eggs, one at a time.

Alternate adding in the flour and the milk--add a little flour, add half the milk, a little flour, the other half of the milk, the rest of the flour--it incorporates a little better when you do it that way.

Finally, fold in that strawberries and jam mixture. Pour into your prepared cupcake/muffin pan. I like to use the Reynolds Staybrite baking cups. And bake for about 20 minutes.

Strawberry-Kiwi cupcake

I had batter leftover and I wanted to do a little something different with it. A friend of mine suggested I make some Strawberry-Kiwi cupcakes sometime. I had picked up some kiwi at the store, and I was trying to figure out how to put it together. Thankfully, with a little of this batter leftover, I had my chance to experiment with it. I chopped up 1 kiwi finely and folded that into my batter (I probably had about 1/3 of it left, so if I were doing this as a complete recipe, I might add 3-4 kiwi, diced finely, to the batter). I baked these mini cupcakes for about 12-15 minutes. I had a little bit of Strawberry Whipped cream leftover from a chocolate cupcake filling--that is the next blog:)

For the Strawberry Whipped Cream:
I started with putting my mixing bowl and my whisk attachment into the freezer for about 15 minutes. I poured in 1 cup of heavy whipping cream, 1 teaspoon of vanilla, and 1 Tablespoon of sugar and mixed until stiff peaks formed. Then I folded in about 1/3 cup of that seedless strawberry jam. I topped those mini cupcakes with some small chunks of kiwi. YUMMY!!!!!!

For the Strawberry Buttercream icing:
1 stick of butter
1/2 cup butter flavored Crisco
4 cups powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 TBSP milk
Pink gel dye (food safe, Wilton brand)
2 TBSP Seedless Strawberry Jam*

Blend the butter and Crisco together. Add in the powdered sugar and milk as you need to. . .you might need more milk depending on the consistency of the icing you want. Add in that vanilla.

*You can change that to whatever jam you want and make a yummy, fabulous tasting icing.

I had some icing in my refrigerator leftover from 2 days before that I didn't use completely. I added some strawberry jam and pink gel dye to this and put it in my stand mixer. It made a lovely, yummy icing.

Buttercream icing will last about 2 weeks in your refrigerator if it is well sealed, so I am told. I honestly don't know as I don't keep it that long. I have made it ahead of time--like for my kids' birthday parties--when I know my day is going to be very full.

Tie Dyed Cupcakes

Tie-Dyed Cupcake

My daughter's bestie was having a birthday, and her mom asked if I could help out with some cupcakes. I said of course, because we all love the girl so much. It also gives me "blog fodder" :), total win-win! Anyway, in the past, I had seen an adorable cupcake that was multicolored on Pinterest. . .Some people called it rainbow, others called it tie-dyed. I have made them before and put it on Pinterest, but I just took a picture of it and typed the directions below. On this blog post, I will give step by step pictures and instructions on how it's done. It isn't just the icing, but the cake is "tie-dyed" too.

I started off really simply with this cake since it takes just a little bit of extra work. I used a strawberry cake mix and I doctored it up just a bit. Instead of water, I used 1 can of strawberry nectar and a little water to equal my liquid content. I also used 2 cake mixes.

My Ingredients

After I made my cake, I divided the batter into 5 different bowls so I could dye my batter. Because I used 2 mixes, I put about 2 cups in each bowl. If you chose to do a different amount of colors, the cup total would vary per bowl. This is the part where you get creative and decide how many and what colors you want to use. For example, I will do this for my son's birthday in a couple of months and use browns and greens and make it look kind of a camouflage look.

My batter divided. You can also see that I have my oven set to 350.

Then I tinted my batter with Wilton gel colors. I used the blue and pink to get the purple color.

My colors

My tinted batter

Then I began to color by color, fill my cupcake liners.

Green

Then a spoonful of pink

The yellow-orange color

The blue color

The purple color

Since I was making 24 cupcakes, I had a little leftover to make a cake with it, that turned out pretty cute.

The cake :)

After about 20 minutes of baking at 350, this is how they looked when they came out. They were a beautiful jewel toned color, that actually reminded me a bit of the Mardi Gras colors.

The baked cupcakes.

I did these the day before and covered them in a cling wrap. I love being able to do things like this in little hitches. It makes it seem like no work at all.

My next step was to prepare the butter cream icing that I had made earlier in the week. The great thing about butter cream icing is that it lasts up to two weeks in the refrigerator. This is another one of those things you can do ahead and it saves you tons of time on party day. I tripled my usual recipe, and I made 3 different colors of the icing. Once I made the icing, I put it in a large pastry bag/piping bag, whatever you actually call them:).  I put a spoonful of the blue in first, then the pink and finally the yellow, right next to each other. What comes out is a really cool effect.

Do you see how each color is separated, but still in at the same time?

I used a Wilton #1M tip to pipe the little cupcake swirl onto the tie-dyed cupcakes.

The Tie Dye Cupcake

This is what the inside looked like after it was all said and done.

The inside of the cupcake.

I had a little icing leftover, so I made a little 4 inch cake and piped colorful stars all over it.

I took this from my phone, so the photo isn't as good, but still adorable (in my opinion anyway).

So I took these to the party and they were a huge hit. I am so glad the Birthday Princess liked them.

The cupcakes and the cake together.