Strawberry Cupcakes

Hiya, so I made cupcakes with a strawberry buttercream ...these may seem like regular strawberry cupcakes but they signify so much more for me as a baker! Behold my first ever successful non chocolate buttercream gasp. It sounds mental I know, but honestly i haven't been able to make a buttercream that wasn't chocolate before....it has seriously been the bane of my baking life.
The cause of many baking disappointments. Shattering all my cupcake hopes and attempts, naively thinking maybe THIS is the day I succeed...It WASN'T.  I just wanted to make a beautiful cupcake adorned  with an elegant swirl of buttercream ....was that so much to ask for (cue the sympathetic NOs!)

I finally figured out what I was doing wrong, why my attempts resulted in a runny mess. I was stupidly using normal butter instead of the unsalted butter you were meant to use. Yep, not something incredibly difficult or scientific. I was just not following the recipe exactly, thinking it'll be fine It wont making that much difference!

So after this baking epiphany, I attempted buttercream again.....and it WORKED! go me! A good baker doesn't blame their tools/ingredients, but I can it was the Flora messing it up not ME!!! Yes I'm ignoring that fact that It was me who decide to use flora in the first place.... denial is a beautiful thing people, a beautiful thing.

Right, enough of me and on to the cupcakes. I was actually making them for a friend of mine who requested strawberry buttercream on top of her cupcakes.  I promised her I would do my best as she was well aware of my track record with butter cream.  I decided to use fresh strawberries to flavour my buttercream: chopped them small and ran them through a sieve to get a fresh strawberry juice.

I used this cupcake recipe and below is the buttercream recipe

140 unsalted butter  (Lurpack)
280 Icing sugar
5 strawberries
Dollop of strawberry Conserve.

I cream the room temp butter first, then add half the icing sugar and mix. Then I added the rest of the icing sugar along with the  strawberry juice/purée along with a dollop of strawberry conserve.I mixed till everything was combined and smooth.

The cupcake was lovely, but it was ALL about the strawberry buttercream it was really delicious. As I was careful to not to make it too sweet  it was perfect. Lovely and smooth with such a delicious strong strawberry flavour! Loved it.