I must admit that don't have any interesting anecdotes to share today 😆
But what I do have for you is a great recipe for strawberry cupcakes with strawberry buttercream frosting. So, if you are a fan of cupcakes, or strawberries or even better, BOTH, then you know what must be done.
My daughters love strawberries. They eat strawberries several times a week so every trip to the grocery store invariably sees me loading up my shopping cart with these red beauties. While still on the subject of berries, the two critters love blueberries and raspberries as well so you will never find my fridge devoid of berries at any given point in time 😀
During the Easter long weekend, I was feeling particularly generous so I told them that they could demand any dessert they wanted and I would make it for them. It came as no surprise to me when they chimed in unison - "Strawberry Cupcakes"!
Cupcakes are a big hit in my household. Everybody likes them irrespective of the flavour. When it comes to the frosting, there is a clear winner - buttercream. I personally find this frosting too sweet but the rest of my family doesn't agree with me. So, I scoured the internet for what I felt would be a good recipe for strawberry cupcakes with a buttercream frosting and I found one that I liked. For me, strawberry cupcakes need to taste like strawberry. Not like pink tinted vanilla cupcakes with a generic sweet but flavourless buttercream. What appealed me to about this recipe was the generous use of strawberries in them - in the cupcake batter, in the buttercream frosting and even topped on the cupcakes before frosting (the latter of which I skipped). This recipe uses both fresh chopped strawberries as well as concentrated reduced strawberry puree.
At the start of making these cupcakes, I decided that I did not want to use any artificial food coloring at all. I bought frozen strawberries to make the strawberry puree because they are more tart and generally have a deeper red color. I wanted the tartness to offset the sweetness of the buttercream and the vibrant hue to contribute to the lovely pink color of the finished product. But I noticed that not adding food coloring to the cupcake batter made the cupcakes take on an unappealing shade of purple-grey after baking. The frosting looked a little dull too so I added a miniscule amount of a gel-based red food coloring just to brighten it up. Whether or not you want to add any coloring is entirely up to you. No judgement here.
The strawberry-perfumed cupcakes turned out fluffy and delicious with delightful chunks of strawberries in every bite. The buttercream although sweet had a pronounced strawberry flavour too and the sliced strawberries on top served as the proverbial cherry on the cake. My daughters were thrilled by the outcome and one of the highlights of this long weekend for them has been greedily tucking into these cupcakes 😄 I have had to negotiate to my best capability to limit it to 1 per day.
That's all from me today. Enjoy the rest of the long weekend folks. Belated Happy Easter 😊
We'll meet again soon...