Strawberry-Cream Cheese Cupcakes

It was so nice to have a week off work over Christmas/New Year. Time to relax and do whatever. I organised an afternoon tea with friends so that I "had" to do some baking.

This is another delight from Betty Crocker's Big Book of Cupcakes - Strawberry-Cream Cheese Cupcakes.

You start with a yellow cake base, add a little square of cream cheese and spoon in a little jam... bake to produce amazingness (<-- anyone who has tasted these cupcakes knows that amazingness is, in fact, a real word).

I was mildly concerned that the jam would bubble and explode and go everywhere. But it didn't. The cupcakes greedily gobbled up the filling as they baked. Less so the mini cupcakes, but that's probably because I gloriously overfilled them.

Now. Cream cheese icing. And swirl.

If you've forgotten the joy of strawberries, you need to remember. Here's something to jog your memory.

A-mazing.

We also devoured other cool stuff, but that will have to wait till next time. Did I mention that I enjoyed my time off work? Happy new year :)

Mint chocolate cupcakes (with extras)

"Mum Goodwin's Chocolate Cake" (from Julie Goodwin's book Our Family Table) makes a nice adaptable chocolate cake base. And I find it kind of fascinating that it tastes so good when it doesn't actually contain any chocolate!

You don't add the cocoa and water mixture into the batter until the final mixing stage, so you get to see it go from what looks like a vanilla cake to suddenly very definitely chocolate!

A word of caution - if you make the full recipe as written into cupcakes you get around 40 little cakes out of it! So since this first run I've taken to halving it and getting the more respectable number of around 20, which you could stretch to an even 2 dozen if you made them a little on the light side.

It was a Friday night and I was feeling experimental so I put strawberry jam in the centre of some of the cupcakes.


In others I put little mint chocolate logs. I didn't realise until after baking that these were, sadly, a bit on the chewy side, but it still added an extra bit of pepperminty flavour.


I pressed Oreo cookies into the top of some of the cupcakes, because you can't really go wrong with the chocolate cake and Oreo pairing.

I tried out a "marshmallow icing" trick that I'd read of on a blog ages ago. When the cupcakes were nearly baked, I took them out and placed a marshmallow on top of each one, then finished baking them. Finally I put them under the grill for a few minutes to brown them a little... but these turned out to be a bit of a mess! Not at all how I imagined they would go, but maybe I baked the marshmallows too long, and they tasted fine anyway.

I had been meaning to make peppermint icing for a very long time, and finally I did it. Yum! Just add peppermint essence to your buttercream instead of vanilla or rosewater.


I enjoyed adding random extras to my cakes, but these basic swirls of peppermint on chocolate definitely looked the classiest.

I added just a dob of icing to the ones with jam or Nutella baked in (did I mention Nutella? I didn't end up eating one of them, but Nutella can't really fail as far as I'm concerned).

This chocolate cake recipe is going on my list of staple bases, and now I have 3 standard buttercream flavours (vanilla, rosewater and peppermint) to mix and match with :)

Strawberry Jam Cupcakes

I went to a family christening recently, for beautiful little girl Ava. I wanted to make some girly cupcakes to take along for the party so a combination of strawberries and pink seemed like the way to go.

I used Willow Bird Baking's Strawberry Jam Cupcakes recipe (<-- link here) almost exactly, just increasing the chopped fresh strawberries to a generous cupful. I liked the combination of fresh fruit in the batter and the jam as a filling, plumping up the flavour and the moisture.

Although I did use cream cheese icing, I opted for the version I've used previously (a half batch adapted from Bakerella) because I know how much it makes. I added a little red food colouring and about a tablespoon of Pavlova Magic to improve firmness. I also sprinkled over some girly little butterfly decorations to finish them.

This is what happens when I use food colouring. But thankfully it did wash out before too long.

The cupcakes were well received. My husband said they tasted like pikelets, which I imagine is down to the strawberry jam and batter combination.

I have had problems neatly extracting mini cupcakes from my non-mini cupcake holder wells, and this is my new "hi-tech" solution. I just cut a small strip of tin foil, double it over to make it stronger and position it under the cake so you can lift it out without wrecking the icing :)