Chocolate Cupcakes with Strawberry Frosting

Eid-al- Adha Mubarak to you all. Hope you all have a wonderful day with family, friends and relatives.

For me, before I start on my cooking and daily chores of the day I thought I will post something for the day to make it special. This is something that I have typed long back, shot pictures even longer before, actually few months back, but just dint find time or gap to post it. Life’s been so busy that I can’t get my head around on anything these days. I have moved to this new place couple of weeks back, and I am travelling to Dubai in another two weeks time. So it’s all a chaos, settling down, shopping, unpacking and packing for travelling on other side. And my little baby (read Blog) is the one getting affected by all this chaos :D. It’s been hard to log into my blog these days, I just peep into it if I need to cook something. Anyhow, let me break all that chaos and give you another fabulous recipe to enjoy.

Today I am posting the recipe of cupcakes that I made a while ago. These beauties were prepared to send off to my little one’s nursery on his last day there. I thought it was nice way of conveying a ‘Thank you’ message by baking something home, rather than getting a ready-made one. I made around 50 mini cupcakes, that turned out perfectly spongy and chocolaty. I had a plan to frost them with my favourite chocolate frosting, but I then thought that would be too chocolaty and sweet. So I frosted them with strawberry as mentioned in the recipe. I made a thin glace rather than a large blob of frosting as it would turn out to be too sweet again. These could be made into large ones, which would come around 16-20 of them. Follow the recipe to dot and get perfect results all way long. Please read Cupcakeblog and the comments given on the site for any doubts.

Chocolate Cupcakes with Strawberry Frosting

Recipe Courtesy: Cupcakeblog

Ingredients:

226 g (2 Sticks) butter at room temperature

2 ½ cups castor sugar

4 large eggs at room temperature

1 ¾ cup plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt

1 cup cocoa powder (I used Cadbury’s)

1 cup whole milk

2 teaspoon vanilla essence

Hundreds and thousands – to sprinkle

Preparations:

1. Beat butter and sugar for 3 minutes on high speed until soft and fluffy.

2. Add egg, one by one at a time to the above mix, mixing well after each addition.

3. In a separate bowl, sieve together flour, baking powder and soda, cocoa powder and salt twice or thrice.

4. Mix vanilla essence with milk.

5. Fold 1/3 of the flour mixture to the egg-sugar mixture followed by little of the milk and mixing well. Repeat the process until milk and flour is all used up. Add flour and milk alternately, starting and finishing off with flour.

6. Scoop the mixture to muffin liners filling just below half or just half full. Bake for 20 minutes in a preheated oven of 180 degrees Celsius or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool them on wire rack completely before frosting them.

N:B:Batter rises quite high, so don’t get tempted to fill more than half full as it will overflow.

For the frosting:

400g icing sugar

175g soft unsalted butter

3 Tablespoons strawberry Pulp (see notes)

Few drops of strained strawberry juice

Prepareation:

1.Mix all until you get a thick glace. Spread on the cooled cakes as required. Add more puree or icing sugar to get the right consistency. Sprinkle with Hundreds and thousands.

Notes:

For making strawberry pulp, I used frozen strawberries. After reading few comments mantioneing about runny frosting, I pureed strawberries in a blender and placed them in a sieve to drain off every drop of juice from it. I heated the strained juice to get thick syrup and used few drops of it to loosen the icing as required and to give some natural colour. I used the frosting as a glace rather than a thick frosting.