Party In Your Mouth: Strawberry Cupcakes

I can't resist the overwhelmingly large containers of fresh fruit at Costco. With strawberry season in full force, how can you resist the 8lb container? Not me! However, I can only snack on so many strawberries - plain, with a little sugar sprinkled on top or dipped in nutella - before the freshness starts to decline. 

I found some very odd, unique takes to dishes using strawberries, such as this strawberry risotto. Not tempting enough to make but still very interesting indeed.  Maybe one day I will venture out and try this....maybe. 

I had a cupcake craving several weeks ago and ended up going to the grocery store to buy some.  They weren't great and didn't satisfy my craving one bit.  This was my opportunity and hooray, it was great!  Using fresh strawberries definitely added an additional level of flavor - the bites of baked strawberries in the cupcakes with the combination of the fresh strawberries in the frosting worked well together.  I don't like overly sweet cupcakes so these cupcakes were perfect. If you like sweeter cupcakes, you can add more sugar - maybe 1/2 cup more or added more sugar to the frosting.  I also made a small batch of mango cupcakes and they were just as good. They made the batter a little more moist and you can probably cut down on the sugar as the mangos I had were incredibly sweet.  Sorry, no pictures of the mango cupcakes.

Strawberry Cupcakes

Makes approximately 36 cupcakes

1 3/4 sticks of unsalted butter

1.5 cups sugar
5 eggs
Zest from two lemons
1 cup sour cream
3 cups cake flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp salt
2.5 cups diced strawberries

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Make sure your butter is room temperature. I like to take mine out at least a half day in advance so it is perfectly creamy when you mix. In your mixer, cream butter and sugar on high for about 2 minute.  

3. For the eggs, I like to bring them out about an hour prior to baking.  Crack into a bowl to make sure you don’t get a bad egg in your batter or any shells.  Add one egg at a time to the sugar butter mixture while it is on medium high. Make sure to stop and scrape down the sides to make sure it is evenly mixed.  

Don't worry if it looks a little curdled. Keep mixing and it will smooth out.  

4. Add the sour cream and vanilla.  You can cut down on the vanilla but I have a tendency to almost always double the amount because I love the hint of flavor it provides. Let this mix on medium slow.  

5. Next, add the lemon zest.  

6. In another bowl, mix together the cake flour, salt and baking soda. You can use unbleached flour if you do not have cake flour. With cake flour, I find that it is just a little lighter and you end up coming out with less dense cupcakes. Add the flour to the mixer in three portions – making sure to turn off the mixture when you add or you’ll have a nice sprinkle of flour on your face and clothes.  

7. Add in the diced strawberries with a spatula and/or fork.

8. With your cupcake pan all nice and lined, use an ice cream scoop and fill each cupcake liner about 3/4th of the way.  

 (I made mini cupcakes too.)

9. Bake for 20-25 minutes. I put my timer at 18 minutes just in case your oven cooks a little faster. My total time in the oven was 22 minutes.

Meringue cupcake frosting

2 egg whites
1 tsp vanilla extract
½ cup sugar
1 stick butter
1 cup diced strawberries

1. With a small bowl set over a pot of simmering water on the stove, beat the egg whites and sugar with a hand mixer until it doubles in size and becomes a little frothy.  You want to make sure the sugar is dissolved.  

2. Pour the mixture into your electric mixer with a whisk attachment (you can probably still use the hand mixer if you’d like) and set it on medium high. Start adding the butter 1 tbsp at a time until it becomes light and creamy. Add in the vanilla extract. 

3. With a spatula, fold in the strawberries into the frosting mixture.  Spread a little bit onto each cupcake and enjoy!

Peaches Divine

You may have noticed from my past comments that I consumed six peaches in one day. Three days later, I realized I ate a total of 14!  You haven't lived until you've eaten these "special" peaches.  My first time back to Taiwan, my dad's cousin's mom made these seasoned, marinated, pickled peaches with asian, salted dried prunes.  In fact, I'm eating a peach as I type.  Heaven. 

My dad, sister and I have a shared obsession with asian dried prunes as snacks. They can be dried prunes, olives, anything. They can be sweet or salty or even a little bit of both.  One of our favorites is this - it's a dried prune that is a bright brick red, salty and is delicious on its own, added to tomatoes, watermelon, mango or even drop a prune in a glass of Sprite.  For the tomatoes, cut the top hole out (basically the stem part you'd cut out anyways) making sure not to cut it all the way through.  Then you push one of these prunes down into the middle of the tomato - best with a very juicy large tomato (no romas) - and let it sit for a day.  Then you can just eat the tomato starting from the top and you get this delicious, salted, very flavorful tomato and juices.  You can find a variety in most Asian grocery stores.  Also, you can find dried prune powder - ooofffh! Sprinkle some on top of watermelon....so good.

So why hadn't we thought to use it with peaches until just a few years ago? I don't know but I'm so happy now!  These peaches are best if they are small and very hard.  Once you marinate these, they can get soft fairly quickly - but that's okay, because its so good, they are usually gone within the first few days.

Asian marinated peaches

6-8 asian, salted dried prunes, red version

4 tablespoons of asian, salted dried prune powder
2 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
8-12 small, very firm/hard peaches (soft ones will get too mushy after a few days)

1. Wash your peaches and bring a bit pot of water to a boil.  Once boiling, add in the peaches and let it cook for roughly 30 seconds. Very quick. Goal here is to get rid of that fuzzy outer layer or anything that is on the skin - prep so peaches have best absorbing/marinating power.

2. Transfer the peaches to a large ziploc bag and add in the sugar, salt, dried prunes and the powder.  Without closing the bag, roll the peaches/bag around so that it is incorporated and mixed well.  Taste and if it needs more powder or sugar, you can add.

3. Let it sit out on the counter with the bag OPEN to let the steam from the peaches out.  This is critical because you don't want to trap extra condensation from the heat of the boiled peaches and then get mushy peaches.  Once cool, zip it up and lay it on its side in the fridge for at least a day.  Putting it on its side is important so each peach can sitting in the juices created by the mix of peach juice, prunes and sugar  It will be good to rolls these around throughout the day so that all sides can absorb the flavors.  Peaches will start turning a pale red and start absorbing the yummy juices.  Just try and only eat one.  I dare you.

Chinese Cake Cupcakes

As mentioned in my previous post, I made cupcake versions of the Chinese birthday cake. Compared to the actual cake, I prefer the big cake since you'll end up having more fruit.  With these little suckers, you can't fit as much fruit. 

All the baking ingredients are the same - you need to make the custard, cake, simple syrup and whipping cream. Recipe in previous post.  Since there are a lot of steps, you can make these over the course of two days, which helped make the process feel less arduous. You can make the custard and cake the night before and then the assembly and whipping cream the next day.

For the cake batter, it made 22 cupcakes.  I lined each cupcake with those paper cupcake shells and poured the batter to approximately 3/4 of the way up.  Same temperature and I baked for 10 minutes - this will vary depending on your oven so just keep a watch.  Cake should be a light golden brown.

After they cool, I peeled away the paper wrapper and cut each cupcake in half horizontally.  I poured/brushed simple syrup on the insides of the two cupcake halves.  For the bottom half, I then added a good layer of the custard, slices of strawberries and then a small dollop of whipping cream.  I put them into new, fresh cupcake paper holders.  On the top half, I also added a layer of custard and then placed on top of the bottom half.  So going from bottom up - cake, custard, strawberry, whipping cream, custard, cake. 

On top of the cupcake, I added another dollop of whipping cream by putting the cream in a ziploc bag, cutting the edge and used as a pastry piper.  Yeah, didn't work out that great, and I ended up having to spread it evenly with a knife afterwards.  For added decoration, add a few slices of strawberries or any other fruit.  Finally, done! 

If you are taking these for a party, make sure to sample one, two or even three  just to make sure they're good enough.  And, yes, it's okay if it's for breakfast.  They're so light that you'll barely feel it and it has fruit so has to be good for you, right?  Enjoy!