Strawberries and Buttercream

Oh dear, I really haven't done this in entirely too long. I made these for my mom's birthday way back in the beginning of January. She specifically requested three types of cupcakes, so here's the first.



For someone who gave birth to such a sugar addict, my mom really isn't huge on sweets. She usually only eats a bite or two of whatever sweet things I make, and leaves the rest. Last year, she requested Creme Brulee: amaaaaazing! Though a plastic bag did wind up lit on fire by a certain someone who was supposedly showing me how professional chefs use the torch.

This year, her first request was for strawberry cupcakes with a vanilla frosting. Why not strawberry frosting? She thought it would be too overpowering. I think she's crazy, but whatever. I originally intended to use the Martha Stewart Strawberry Cupcake recipe in her cupcake book, but quickly realized my copy of the book has disapppeared into the ether. Instead, I trolled pinterest until I stumbled across this recipe from Apron of Grace.

They turned out super moist and delicious! I'll definitely make this recipe again. Even though it was a bit more labor intensive than I usually do for the actual cake portion of cupcakes (I prefer to spend my time eating batter and frosting doing fun fillings and creative flavored frostings), it was definitely worth it.



For the frosting, I wanted to do something special. I wound up using just a basic buttercream recipe (I'll include it in the bottom of this post), but I used Wilton's foodcoloring and normal food coloring to turn it pink and grey. After a giant fiasco with seran wrap, I just shoved gobs of the colors on opposite sides of the frosting back and went from there. About halfway through, I ran out of frosting and was running out of time, so they weren't all this pretty. It was definitely a fun change of pace from my usual frosting technique. I'd love to try this with more than two colors. Maybe next holiday...

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Basic Buttercream Frosting

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• 1 cup softened butter


• 4 cups powdered sugar


• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract


• 2-3 tablespoons milk

Beat butter until pale and fluffy, then slowly add in powdered sugar and vanilla. Add milk one tablespoon at a time, until you achieve desired consistency.

This is the basic recipe I use for most of my frosting- I play around with ratios when adding other flavors. For example, when making the grape soda cupcakes, I used 4 tablespoons grape soda, rather than vanilla and milk. Yum yum yum! For these cupcakes, I just left it as basic vanilla buttercream, as my mom requested.