Strawberry Cupcakes (and Daquiris!)

Unsure of what to bake Wednesday night for a few friends, I was passing Garden of Eden, this amazing specialty grocery store in Hoboken that has the best produce. There was a pile of stacked quarts of strawberries there, as usual, but the price has come down so much since the winter. And the berries looked amazing. I had to make strawberry cupcakes.

It is so hard to find good lighting in my cave of an apartment!

I made these for the first time last year for Morgan & my birthday party, but in mini form. I used the recipe I found from Sprinkles (a popular cupcake chain on the West Coast) on the Martha Stewart website. You can find the recipe here. After making them again this time, I remembered (after the fact, of course...) what modifications I had wanted to make to the recipe after making it in November. The cake comes out very dense and moist, and the frosting is awesome, but really thin. What I should have done (and will hopefully remember to do next time) is whipped at least 1 of the egg whites to fold into the batter to lighten it up (this is a good bet for any fruit recipes-they tend to be heavier than others) and maybe even condensed the strawberry puree into a thicker syrup (this definitely should have been done for the frosting). Those few things aside, these really are one of my favorite cupcake flavors. Plus I can fool myself into thinking they're healthy because they're made with whole fresh fruit.

One interesting thing about these cupcakes is they have a really short shelf life. Usually, when I bake cupcakes, they can stay fresh for many days in one of my cupcake containers. With the strawberry though, after really one or two days, they start leaking. Yep, leaking. It is SO weird. After that time frame, you open the container and find them sitting in a little pile of strawberry/sugary goo. Gross. I'm definitely interested in seeing if this happens when I lighten the batter up.

Yes, they tasted as good as they looked

I had some left over strawberry puree on Thursday night, and picked up more strawberries to make strawberry daquiris for Meghan & Lauren. It's really a toss-up what was better - the cupcake or the daquiri. But, the pairing of the two was amazing!

So happy together...