Strawberry Cupcakes for a birthday at school

Bubby usually takes the day off from school on his birthday. But since he's graduating this year, we decided he should go. We celebrated with lunch and cake back at home on Sunday, and on Monday he wanted to bring in cupcakes to share with his favorite teachers and classmates.

I decided to make strawberry cupcakes. A few years ago I'd made a couple of strawberry cakes, one from Preppy Kitchen and one from Sally's Bake Blog. The Preppy Kitchen cake was better, so I looked for a strawberry cupcake recipe on that website. I found this recipe. It is different from his strawberry cake recipe, which uses strawberry preserves, whereas the cupcake recipe uses fresh strawberries. Since they'd all be eaten right away, no worries about mushy fruit over a couple of days, so I went with it. 

Amazingly I had the precise amount of frosting needed from the birthday cake (Hamburger Cake from previous pose) to pipe a 1M swirl on each of the 12 cupcakes. I piped the frosting with the cupcakes right in the carrier, so as not to disturb the buttercream by moving it around.  Not even a smidge of buttercream was left over after frosting the cupcakes, but I comfortably piped 12 swirls!  That buttercream was not 100% chocolate but had a couple tablespoons of cocoa in it, so I'm sure there was a bit of a mocha taste which would pair well with the strawberry.

For a decoration I melted some chocolate chips in an alphabet mold to make 12 "K"s for Bubby's initial. This took a while, since I only have one mold. After filling the mold it has to set up in the freezer for 5-7 minutes and then it will pop out but multiplied by 12 it still took a couple of hours. I made these decorations the night before, but I placed them on the cupcakes in the morning before the van picked him up. That way they would look pristine.

The carrier needed to be secured as well, because last time Bubby took it to school someone broke the latch on one side of the lid.  The lid also has the handle, so in order for it to stay on I secured the broken side with duct tape then wrapped some twine around the whole thing. 

I didn't get to try the cupcakes so I can't say if they were dry, which is a concern given the oven problems I've been having. Someone did write back to thank me and said they were delicious, so I hope they weren't just being polite!

It's a bit bittersweet to know this is the last time I'll ever send cupcakes in to school with Bubby. It seems like just yesterday I dropped off cupcakes for his 6th birthday. But that's how fast it goes.

Strawberry cupcakes with Mocha buttercream 
and chocolate decoration



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creepy Crawly Spiderweb Cake

Image
Bubby's friend was coming over after a bike ride and I wanted to make them a Halloween-themed treat.  I've been wanting to make a spiderweb cake for a while.  I sure came away with some do's and don'ts! I chose to use  this recipe  from King Arthur Baking.  Not sure why but I had my heart set on making it in an 8x8 square pan, and this recipe fit the bill. It's a recipe that calls for no eggs and no butter! I was a bit anxious about greasing but not flouring the pan, but the cake didn't stick to the sides when cutting it so that was fine.  The cake baked for 32 minutes (should have been 31) in my Corning Ware pan. Had I used an aluminum pan I'm sure it would have been ready much sooner.   I'd never made ganache using chocolate chips and I wanted to try it so this was my opportunity.  This recipe also calls for half and half rather than heavy cream, for the ganache.  It was more difficult to melt the chocolate chips and incorporate the into the half and h
Read more

Lemon Blueberry Scones

Image
 My friend S was back from spending the Summer in Paris, and we'd planned to get together for coffee.  I wanted to bring something and decided on Lemon Blueberry Scones because I had exactly the right amount of blueberries in the house. This was only my second time making scones!  Years ago I made chocolate chip scones and remember the dough being super unwieldy, hard to shape and not fun.  I decided to try again using  this recipe  from Sally's Bake Blog. It calls for grated frozen butter and although a pain, it made all the difference.  It was taking forever to grate and hurting my arm when I realized pressing down hard on the butter made it go faster.  The last bits I had to cut into small pieces with a knife, so as not to grate my finger.  The rest of the process was easy, no mixer required. I used DIY buttermilk, because I didn't have heavy cream, and it worked fine.  To cut the individual scones, I floured the bench scraper thoroughly between cuts. This was helpful. I
Read more

Sugar Pumpkin Cookies Fall 2023

Image
I made these Sugar Pumpkin Cookies for a bake sale for an after-school club of Bubby's. I relied on my old Martha Stewart recipe for the cookies and  my favorite royal icing recipe . I used 10 tablespoons of water which worked out great on this particular day (it does depend on the level of humidity on any given day). Lately I'd been adding 9 tablespoons then had to add extra water afterwards. I don't have any orange food coloring, so I made an orange color using red and yellow. It was a bit peachy but once piped it was OK. I used brown for the stems.  With such flowy icing, I piped the two outer sections of the pumpkin on a few cookies at a time, let them set for a few minutes, then went back and piped the middle section and the stem.  In this way the icing didn't flow together (as happened with the first few cookies I piped) and I was able to show the three distinct sections I wanted.  In spite of the low humidity on this day these took almost 24 hours to dry, so I h
Read more