Chocolate Strawberry Filled Cupcakes

I have seriously been waiting for strawberries to come back into season for months. Mostly because i wanted to replicate last year's experience of getting to smell cooking strawberries. Best.smell.ever. And because i am still trying to get a handle on the whole "filling" cupcakes thing.

So i set out to make some (kinda barely) Mardi Gras themed cupcakes for the usual drunken debauchery at the Evan's house.

Used the same chocolate cake recipe as last time, except i used better cocoa powder this time. Yummy Ghirardelli! I could taste the difference. You can find the recipe here.

And I used pretty gold liners. Because there is no such thing as Mardi Gras liners.

The frosting was the same as this frosting (except with the measurements halved!!!) And in case you havent noticed, i really prefer cream cheese frosting. I hate buttercream.

I used the same technique for the strawberry sauce. I cooked one carton, separated the 1/4 cup for the frosting and used the rest for the strawberry filling. I got the recipe from Wilton. But they used frozen strawberries so i had to make up my own recipe using the fresh ones i has just cooked.

So i mixed together:

1/4 cup of strawberry sauce

1 cup of water

2 table spoons of corn starch

1/3 cup sugar

2 teaspoons of lemon

And heated them for about 10 minutes, stirring constantly. It looks gross. It does. I won't lie. Once it was cooled, i added the rest of the strawberry sauce that was left over from the carton and stirred it in. YES IT LOOKS GROSS. I already said it did. But it tasted good!

I threw in the resulting 2 cups or so into a ziplock and used a piping tip to fill the cupcakes. This time around though, i made 5-6 holes in each one to get as much in as possible. It took too long, and only worked okay. I need a cupcake corer. Bad. It's on my to buy list! (Or on your list of things to buy me...)

I dyed the frosting purple, which means everyone thought they were raspberry. They weren't!

I think the most exciting part about this batch was that i finally got to use the stickers that Katie bought me for Christmas. Instead of a cupcake carrier i might have gone out and bought an actual box. =x haha. (I kinda want to buy some pink boxes to have on hand, actually...) I don't think anyone noticed it on the box once it was opened, but i did. I knew it was there!

I will admit though, i have gotten reallllllllllly lazy with the decorating in the last year. Mainly because i've been too busy concentrating on baking from scratch that the aesthetics have become secondary. Maybe once i have a handle on the standard flavors, i'll get back into it. But for now i will be lame and go back to my standard cop out of using chocolate on top of everything.

xo,

Anna