Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcakes

I never cease to be amused by transforming things into cupcake flavors. I am actually rather backlogged in showing off some of the things I baked lately, but long story short, I made a cupcake a couple weeks ago that was an homage to cheesecake, and it made me think that it could really go one step further.
Utilizing the always dependable Smitten Kitchen's epic recipe stash, I incorporated her black bottom cupcake cream cheese filling (with some adaptation) into a honey and graham flour cupcake base, and then topped with freshly sliced strawberries and a homemade strawberry glaze, with a decorative cream cheese frosting border (intended to add structural support in case the glaze decided to get slippery). I am happy to report that everything seemed to work out swimmingly, even for a first experimental try. Love it when that happens.

Honey and Graham Cupcake
- 6 tbs butter, room temp
- 1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
- 1/4 cup honey
- 1 egg and 1 egg yolk
- 3/4 cups all purpose flour
- 1/4 cup graham flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/3 cup milk

Preheat over to 350˚. Line baking tins. This recipe should make just over a dozen regular sized cupcakes.
Whisk together flours, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl. Set aside.
With electric mixer on high, beat butter and brown sugar until fluffy. Add in honey until incorporated, followed by eggs. Beat until the point of being fluffy again, then turn mixer down low and in batches, mix in flour and then milk until incorporated. Do not over mix.
Dollop mix into cupcake tins to just about half full (aren't we so optimistic). Set aside while making cream cheese filling.

Baked-in Cream Cheese Filling
- 8 oz cream cheese
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 tbs cornstarch

Beat cream cheese and sugar together until smooth, then add in egg and beat until smooth, then add in vanilla and cornstarch until smooth. This is more filling than you will need (go ahead and double the cupcake recipe then!)

Dollop a spoonful of filling into the cake battered cupcake tins. Since the batter is actually kind of thick, I took a spoon and sort of hollowed out the inside of each cup before adding the cream cheese filling. I think it helped keep the filling mor or less in the middle versus resulting in being a top layer of the cupcake.

Bake for 20 minutes.

Cupcakes and filling will rise very nicely, but will fall a little when you take out of the oven. The filling may seem a little giggly while it's still warm, but once they get to room temperature, everything solidifies nicely. Sort of a typical cheese cake reaction, so don't freak out and over bake them.

Strawberry Glaze
So I happened to have about a half a cup of strawberry puree in my freezer from some previous strawberry project, so used that. If I had to guess, I'd say it was about the equivalent of a dozen large strawberries. Maybe 6-8oz. Give or take. To it, I added some undetermined amount of water... let's say 1/2 a cup, and 1/3 cup of sugar. I let that boil until it started foaming up, then strained out the chunks and seeds and put back over low heat and added a surrey of about 1 tablespoon water and 2 teaspoons of cornstarch. Once that started boiling again, I just whisked it all together to make sure it was incorporated and removed from the heat and let set for a couple minutes.  Should coat the back of a wooden spoon easily. And yes, another case of having too much glaze for the number of cupcakes I made. This made a lot of glaze... Enough for maybe 3-4 dozen cupcakes. I will find out how well it freezes and report back in a few months.

Cream Cheese Frosting
This (again) will make way more frosting than you need for this project, but I'm sure you can think of other things to do with leftover cream cheese frosting. You own a spoon, right?
- 8 oz cream cheese
- 8 oz butter, room temperature
- 3 cups powdered sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla
Beat cream cheese and butter together until smooth. 1 cup at a time, add in powdered sugar until mix is fluffy. Add in vanilla and continue to beat (scraping down the sides as needed), until the whole thing is fluffy and elastic.

Once things have cooled down a bit, gently wash off as many strawberries as there are cupcakes (1 per cupcake for medium sized berries - if they are particularly large, 1 strawberry can top 2 cupcakes). When presenting berries, I typically don't drown them under running water, but instead dab them with a moist paper towel to clean them. Otherwise, I guess you could rinse them off earlier in the process so they're are dry again once you're ready to slice them - basically, you just don't need a bunch of excess water ruining your set up at this point.

You then top each cupcake with a splayed strawberry, then using a pastry brush, dollop and spread glaze over it.

With a small tip on a pastry bag, pipe frosting around edges. You can be as decorative as you please, my only goal was to encase the strawberries in an attempt to contain them. The glaze wasn't runny though, so in the end, the frosting ended up being purely decorative (oh, and tasty). 

Cake Pops

So I've seen these all over the place, but have actually only ever tried them 2 times (by trying, I mean tasting, not making). Most recently, while on a little vacation in New Orleans, one of the companions on our trip brought down some "cake bombs" from a place in Chicago called Bleeding Heart Bakery. Though I'm not sure how they made theirs, I was pretty sure it was similar to what I'd heard went into a cake pop (minus the popsicle stick), and I adored how they covered some of their flavors in cocoa nibs and hazelnuts, so that's what I opted to try when making my own.

So, I think you're supposed to mix cake with frosting until mushy enough to form into a ball. I didn't have any leftover frosting, but did have some leftover strawberry curd, so figured I'd give that a shot instead. Can't say for sure that the treats have a very strong strawberry flavor, but they are delightfully chocolatey. I made my basic chocolate cake but in true 9x13 inch cake form instead of cupcakes (and baked for 45 minutes, instead of 20). I crumbled some pieces into a bowl and mixed with the curd and formed them into balls. Sorry for the lack of precise measurements; true to form, I wasn't really keeping track. I put mini popsicle sticks into the balls and froze them for about 10-15 minutes, then coated them with melted dark chocolate. I didn't bother too much with tempering since I was going to cover them all over with topping anyway, but I would recommend adding a little vegetable oil to the chocolate so that it cuts down on the bloom (something I have a huge problem with, but hear tell that some people don't struggle with it nearly as much as I do). I let the chocolate drip off and then rolled them in nibs and chopped hazelnuts and laid them out to dry on parchment paper. They only took about 10 minutes to harden.

I will test them out at the office tomorrow, and say that they are a Valentine's day treat. I mean, it is chocolate, right?  Chocolate = Valentines Day.  If they go over well, I will probably keep it in mind if I ever have any leftover cake and frosting, that these would be a good way to use up leftover ingredients. 

4 Flavors

A simple way to add variety to your life, I made a batch of devil's food cupcakes and topped them with 4 different flavors of frosting. Only a little extra time for each frosting, but totally worth it to spice things up.

Flavors, clockwise, starting from front.

Flavor 1: Strawberry
Regular buttercream frosting, but with fresh strawberry puree instead of milk. I topped the cupcake with the frosting, then spotted it with a couple sesame seeds and mint leaves to make it look like a strawberry top. No food coloring was used, but it could be cute to make it a little richer in red color.

Flavor 2: Kahlua
Buttercream made with Kahlua instead of milk and topped with a sprinkling of cocoa powder.

Flavor 3: Grand Marnier
Buttercream made with Grand Marnier instead of milk. Should have added orange juice or rind to the frosting mix, because the Grand Marnier by itself wasn't quite cutting it. I did top it with candied orange rind pieces, but it didn't add enough flavor.

Flavor 4: Hazelnut
First I spread a little Nutella on the cupcake, then I put on a layer of Frangelico buttercream. Topped with a hazelnut.

Neopolitan Cupcakes

Can't decide what flavor you want? Why not have them all-in-one!?

I made cupcakes for a birthday at the office tomorrow and was given liberty to choose the flavor.
*drunk with power*

I saw an image for a Neopolitan Cupcake recipe in one of the many cupcake cookbooks out there, and was disappointed in how the cupcake itself was merely a marble cake that completely disregarded the strawberry flavor altogether. Feeling like it was an issue I should fix, I created the complete Neopolitan Cupcake, from batter to frosting - through and through.

I decided to use my standard "off-white" cake recipe (not quite white, not quite yellow) and double it. I creamed the butter and sugar all together, then separated it into 3 bowls. I then specialized each batch by adding cocoa powder to one and a couple tablespoons of strawberry jam to another and finished mixing the batters. (Admission of guilt: I wanted to leave my cupcakes all natural, and as nature intended and all that, but couldn't help the marketing person inside me who was not convinced that the strawberry looked very flavorful, so did add a dab of good ol' red concentrate to liven the batter up).

To prepare them, I actually ended up cupping each liner in my hand and quickly dropped a spoonful of each flavor into the liner, while carefully using gravity to keep the strawberry batter on the far edge of the liner while I hurried to fill the rest with chocolate and then vanilla. The vanilla in many instances ended up more or less resting on top of the chocolate scoop, but once I put the liner into the pan, it seemed to smooth out and look more even.

I baked them for just under 20 minutes, and made a cream cheese based frosting for them. I did similar to the batters by simply adding cocoa powder and jam to make the second and third flavors. The only thing I would do differently next time is create each batch of frosting completely separate (instead of creaming the butter, cream cheese, and powdered sugar altogether and then separating them into 3 bowls at that point). I think the differences will be that the cocoa powder will be sifted in with the powdered sugar from the start, making it smoother, and the jam to frosting ratio will be better proportioned, as this time, I felt like the strawberry frosting was a bit runnier than the others.

But all that considered, I think it worked out well. It was a bit more labor intensive than most cupcakes simply because I decided to frost them all by spatula in 3 separate batches as opposed to using 3 separate pastry bags. But I thought it would have a nice effect to look more like ice cream than to have some fancy decorative tip.

I'm ready for another taste-test right now :)