When you look at a cupcake, you’ve got to smile. – Anne Byrn
Suzy’s Strawberry Cupcakes
I am pleased to say that the World’s Biggest Coffee Morning – Macmillan Cancer Support at York St John University was a huge success. We raised over £360!
For my entry to the bake-off competition, I made some strawberry and white chocolate cupcakes. Although they sadly did not win (you can’t win them all I suppose!) they did sell out extremely quickly and I had some really lovely feedback. As such, I feel confident to share this recipe with you.
One of the trickiest things for me was trying to get a strong strawberry taste but I think (hope!) I have managed it, thanks to Pamela for the tip!
Suzy’s Strawberry Cupcakes
Makes 12
Ingredients
2 punnets of strawberries, washed and hulled
150gr. Self-raising flour
120gr. Butter
120gr. Caster sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1\2tsp. Baking powder
250gr. White chocolate
4tbsp. Double cream
1tbsp. Balsamic vinegar
1further tbsp. Caster sugar
Pink food colouring
(some extra milk)
Method
- You will need to make the icing the night before so it firms up enough to pipe onto your cupcakes.
- To make the icing, chop up 6-8 strawberries and add to a metal saucepan.
- Into the saucepan, add the balsamic vinegar and a tablespoon of caster sugar.
- Gently, on a low heat, mash up the strawberries with a fork and mix well.
- Once all the strawberries have broken up, pass through a sieve into a jug. You will need 2 tbsp. strawberry coulis for the icing. Leave to cool.
- Break up 200gr. white chocolate into a saucepan
- Add 4tbsp. double cream to the pan and heat up on the lowest setting until just melted. Stir with a spatula every so often to thoroughly incorporate the cream and chocolate and to ensure the mixture does not burn.
- Mix in 2tbsp. of the strawberry coulis. It’s fine if you mix in slightly more, but no more than 3 tbsp.
- Pour into a bowl and leave to cool. Once cooled cover with Clingfilm and place in the fridge to firm up overnight.
- The next day…
- Line a 12 hole bun tin with cupcake cases.
- In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until you get a light and fluffy texture.
- Add the eggs with half the flour and whisk.
- Fold in the rest of the flour.
- Blend about 12 strawberries in a food processer, pass through a sieve and add to the rest of the cake mixture and mix through.
- You should get a dropping consistency so if the mixture is too liquid, add some more flour, or if it is too firm, add some extra milk until you get the consistency required.
- Add an equal amount of mixture to each cupcake case. For this I use an ice-cream scoop which means I get the same size of cupcake nearly every time. My oven seems to have different ideas!
- Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes. They are ready when they are golden brown and you can stick a skewer in the cake and it comes out clean.
- After they come out of the oven, place them on a cooling rack to cool.
- Take the ganache icing out of the fridge. To make the icing look more pink, add some pink food colouring until it reaches your desired pinkness.
- Place the icing into a piping bag and pipe onto the cupcakes.
- For the decoration, take 12 small strawberries of equal size and dry them off as much as you can. Place onto the middle of the cupcake.
- Melt 50gr of white chocolate. (I melt the chocolate in a microwaveable bowl at 20 second intervals, stirring between each interval.)
- Drizzle over the cupcakes as per the picture above.
Suzy says:
- Although they may take longer than normal cupcakes, I think the result is worth the time. I have been working on my decoration skills and this is one I was really pleased with.
- Adding balsamic vinegar does seem to intensify the flavour of the strawberries and I would like to thank Pamela for this tip.
