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.
