Blackberry Cupcakes with White Chocolate Frosting

So remember that crazy i talked about?  It makes me have internal monologues with myself like this:

Me: Look! Blackberries are on sale for87 CENTS A CONTAINER.  

Self: Oh Em Gee, that's hellah cheap!  Get one!

Me: Already on it...

Self: Would go great on your greek yogurt you know.

Me: I'm buying THREE.

Self: What, why? They're all ripe.  You can't eat that much yogurt.

Me: Yogurt? I'm going to bake all the things with it.

Self: For WHAT? You'd have to bake tomorrow. And tomorrow, you're sitting at home by yourself all day. You'd have to eat 12 cupcakes! Don't do it!

Me:  -.-
Cashier: Paper or plastic?

So in short, blackberries went on crazy sale and i decided to bake for no reason at all.  And guess what?  They were crazy good.  =x  I wish i could have given these to more people.  Because i actually thought they'd turn out bad, but they were nommies.  

I used the blackberries in four ways; 1) to flavor the cake 2) to make a filling  3) drizzle on top of the frosting 4) garnish.  Then i used Ghirardelli white chocolate chips to make a white choco butter cream frosting.  The result of it all was a pretty gosh darn good cupcake with all sorts of flavors playing off each other.  And as my dear Pam  said, the prettiest looking cupcake she has seen me produce yet! Haha. 

I ended up taking 100 pictures.  Makes sense since i spent the ENTIRE day in the kitchen.  So needless to say, prepare for a picture heavy post. 

I made 12 cupcakes.  Double this recipe if you'd like a full batch.

First step is to make the blackberries useful.  I did that by making them into a blackberry sauce.

Blackberry Sauce

2 containers of blackberries 

1.5 table spoons  of sugar

Directions: 

Wash and drain blackberries in a bowl.  Pour sugar on top and set aside for 15 minutes.  

Put berries into a saucepan and heat on low, stir frequently.  

Crush them with a potato masher.  

Turn off when they start to boil.
Throw into blender on puree setting. You will see lots and lots of seeds.

Pour into strainer.  This takes forever. >.<  You will have to (with clean hands) press down on the puree to make sure its going through the strainer.  You'll also have to stop at least once to scrape out all the little seeds and toss them.  Let it cool a little before doing this though, or you will burn your fingers.

You will end up with a very rich red sauce.  We will use it on it own as well as add it to other things.

The first thing we will do with it is use it to make the filling.

Blackberry Filling

1/3 cup blackberry sauce

1 cup water

2 tablespoons corn starch

1/3 cup sugar

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

Directions: 

Combine sugar and cornstarch.  

In a saucepan on low heat, combine sauce, water and lemon juice.

Add in sugar/cornstarch mixture a little at time and stir constantly.

It's ready when its thick and gelatinous 

Tip: 

Sift cornstarch first to avoid lumps.

You can set this aside to cool so it's ready for the baked cupcakes.

But first the cupcake!

Blackberry Cupcakes 

1 stick room temp butter

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 room temp eggs

1 1/4 cups flour

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup room temp milk

1/4 cup room temp sour cream

1/2 cup blackberry sauce

Directions:

In one bowl whisk together the sauce, sour cream and milk and set aside.

This actually looks pretty good and i had to fight the urge to try some.  I don't think it would have TASTED yummy. 

In a second bowl combine salt, flour and baking powder and set aside.

Cream butter and sugar, adding in the eggs and vanilla.

Add dry ingredients and wet ingredients into the butter mixture in five sections; flour, milk, flour, milk, flour. 

This process looks pretty, as you make the batter more and more purple!

Line your muffin pan with 12 liners, and add a ice cream scoop size amount of prety purple batter.  Bake in a preheated oven for about 15 minutes at 325*.

Once they are done and cool comes the really fun part.

CORING THEM!

It's like my new favorite thing, I swear.  I bought this fun little guy at Target for like five bucks.  (When you buy yours, it wont have purple cupcake crumbs on it, don't worry.

How it works is that you stick the big part into the cupcake all the way to the base.

Then you twist it in a  circular motion and pull up.  You end up pulling up a core of the cupcake, making a hole in it and keeping the middle inside the corer itself.  Use the little part of the corer to take out the innards.

 You can toss the inside. Or eat it.  Or use it for cakepops.

This is what it looks like on the left.  I took a knife and cut the top off so that i could use it later to cover up the hole I made.

 Now you get to use the blackberry filling that we made to fill the holes! Pipe in the filling. And by pipe i mean shove as much filling as possible up in there.  Cuz you best believe this filling is yummy.

Cover with the tops!  See how they pop out?  Yeah, that's filling heavy for you.  

What's left to do?  The frosting.  This is probably the first time in a year that i tried making a frosting that wasn't cheese cream based.  And i am glad i did.  It was a little difficult to get the hang of, but i will try it again.  I was totally eating more of it than i should have.

White Chocolate Frosting
(taken from here)

5 oz. melted white chocolate chips

1 stick room temp butter

2 1/4 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1-2 tablespoons of room temp milk

Directions: 

Melt chocolate chips in microwave, set microwave on high and melt in 30 second increments, stirring often.  Should take 2-3 minutes.

Beat butter in mixer until fluffy, add vanilla.

Add powdered sugar 1/2 cup at a time.

Add melted chocolate.

Pour in milk as needed.

Tips:
 MAKE SURE NOT TO OVER COOK THE CHOCOLATE.  For reals.  Don't over melt  Watch it like a hawk.  Also, keep stirring once its out until you add it to the mixer because you dont want it to harden.  Scrape down the sides of the mixer as needed.

The end result is a thick thick frosting. That tastes just as yummy as it looks.

Pipe it onto all your cupcakes.  Work as fast as you can, because if it hardens inside the tips it's a pain to frost.

If you actually look closely, all the cupcakes look piped differntly.  That's because i used the wrong tip (2D instead of 1M) for half of them before i noticed.  Oops. They still look pretty though.

Next we get to re-create a murder scene.  At least that's what it looks like because i don't have a fancy squeeze bottle, and just took a spoon and splashed and dripped and threw the left over strawberry sauce over the cupcakes.

Once they allhave that drizzle, just add the finishing touch -- a blackberry on top.

Don't they look so pretty all together???

The best part of course, is the mixture of all the flavors.  At least for most.  When you slice it in half you can see that better.

My boss told me that she took a bite out of it and then decided to eat the inside filling with her finger. lol!

These might be my favorite ones I have made so far.  :)   Yes they took ALL day, but they were kinda worth it!

xoxo,
Anna