Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes

A lovely friend and neighbor recently graduated with her Masters.  When I received her evite for a berry themed party, I was very excited about all the wonderful strawberry possibilities.  We have a respectable number of strawberries coming from our little garden.  I started searching for more ways to enjoy.  

This neighbor never lacks for wonderful food at any of her shindigs, but, one of the best ways I know to show some love is to bake.  The cupcakes ended up fitting right in.  When we entered the house, we were served freshly picked beautiful, locally grown strawberries w/ either champagne or powdered sugar.  Beautiful and delicious.  Doesn't that sound like a fabulous greeting?

I'm a baking blog junkie--my little baking blog is small potatoes compared to the many wonderful options out there...have you ever heard of the Daring Kitchen?  Take a look at all the amazing bakers that participate.  Many of them are oh so inspiring.  I'm not a participant.  Just an admirer.

I like to look at blog after blog and see who some of my favorites follow.  Anyway, I stumbled across a new blog:  Love & Olive Oil, from which this ingenious little recipe came.  Doesn't it just sound delicious.  

I've had a lot of baking firsts this past year -- making the buttercream for this recipe was one of them.  I had always thought making a buttercream was a little out of my league.  It wasn't!  The main mistake I made was using my hand mixer.  It would have been so much easier if I had taken the extra effort to use my stand mixer.  A lot of mixing of the egg whites/butter.  

Check out the recipe linked above.  There's lemon juice and zest in the batter; the recipe also calls for full fat coconut milk.  It's so neat that they don't taste very 'coconutty'--it just results in a decadent, dense, moist cupcake.  Lemon, vanilla, and pureed strawberries go in the butter cream.  Yum.  I want to invest in a larger star-tip.  I'd like more practice piping too.  You'll see the Love & Olive Oil iced cupcaked look a bit more professional than mine.

These cupcakes were delicious.  I think I'm going to have to try this recipe again.  Maybe I'll have enough strawberries from my own garden for another batch.  We'll see.