These Chocolate Cupcakes with Strawberry Frosting. Fresh strawberry frosting, I might add. Ahhh!! Be still my beating heart…

(And let me purchase this Pavlovian Conditioning Wristband for over-eating before I dig in to these beauties… ) ((<– Just included for Lol’s))

Just consider: pillowy soft and moist chocolate cupcakes, topped with a delicately sweet and decidedly fruity strawberry buttercream. And also imagine: no unnecessary piping bags or equipment to create a beautiful bakery-esque frosting swirl. (Ziplocks are how I roll around here at The Gourmet Gourmand kitchen).

Basically, these cupcakes are my favorites. I know there are a lot of cupcake recipes on the internet. And please don’t flatter me with the inappropriate credit of inventing this recipe myself (although I kind of invented the frosting). The cupcake recipe was snagged from The Cupcake Project, where the author created 7 rounds of cupcakes that were taste-tested by a panel of judges. And the recipe included here is the one that they preferred. And I absolutely loved it as well.

The texture ended up being soft and moist, but definitely dense enough to hold up to a hefty mound of frosting. The flavor was decidedly chocolately and incorporated a combination of melted chocolate as well as cocoa powder. Dream. Come. True. I did not use any coffee to punch up the cocoa flavor, and didn’t miss it, but if you can’t imagine chocolate baking without, you are welcome to add 1 teaspoon of instant coffee/ espresso powder to the batter. Now the strawberry buttercream was a recipe invented in my own head. I basically took a whole bunch (read: 1/2 pound) of fresh strawberries, pureed them with a little water in the blender, and then cooked the heck out of them in a saucepan.

The idea with any fresh fruit frosting is that you need to remove a huge amount of the liquid from the fruit or else you’ll end up with a weeping, seeping mess. No one wants that.

So be prepared to watch and stir for a while as the strawberry puree cooks down, or buy yourself some strawberry jam to use instead. The puree will get kind of frothy for a while and then eventually settle down. The color should darken slightly. You’ll know its ready when it’s popping and spluttering similar to cooked polenta or grits, and have a similar consistency. After you’ve prepared your puree, make sure to strain it well with a fine mesh sieve to remove the seeds. My technique here is to “assist” by mashing it back and forth with a rubber spatula until the seedless puree seeps through. It should be thick enough that this will be required- it shouldn’t all pour through by itself. You will need to scrape off the bottom of the sieve to access all your lovely puree.

Volume-wise I ended up with about 5 tablespoons of puree.

Then proceed to whip up a buttercream as you normally would- butter and powdered sugar. And add that beautiful strawberry puree to add a punch of tangy strawberry flavor.

Decorate as you see fit! Enjoy!

