Chocolate Strawberry Cupcakes
Description
Black cocoa chocolate cupcakes with chocolate strawberry ganache and strawberry buttercream frosting with sliced strawberries on top
Ingredients
Cupcakes
Ganache Filling
Strawberry Buttercream Frosting
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees
- Mix the flour, sugar, black cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder and salt in a large mixing bowl and set aside
- In a separate medium sized mixing bowl whisk together the egg, sour cream, vegetable oil and vanilla until combined.
- Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix until no dry spots remain.
- Add the hot coffee or hot water (with or without espresso powder, whatever you have) to the mixture and mix for a smooth consistency.
- Line a muffin tin with baking liners and fill them halfway and bake for 13-15 minutes (I tend to go a bit too full that will just make the cupcake dome up a bit, which really isn’t a bad thing, but you might need to bake them a few minutes more if you do that). The top of the cupcake should spring back when poked. Or you can use a toothpick and insert it into the center of the cupcake. If it comes out clean with a few crumbs, your cupcakes are ready to be taken out.
- While the cupcakes bake, you can get the ganache rolling. Place the semi-sweet chocolate chips in a heatproof bowl on the counter. (glass is fine for this)
- In the smallest sauce pan you have, heat the heavy cream on low-medium heat until it starts to simmer. This can take a bit, but you don’t want the cream to burn so whisk it around a bit every couple of minutes.
- Once it is simmering you can take it off the heat and pour it into the bowl of chocolate. Let it sit there for a couple of minutes before trying to whisk it together.
- When whisking together it may seem like there’s too much liquid but keep stirring it will come together.
- Add the softened butter and salt to your mixer bowl. Beat the butter at a high speed until pale in color and fluffy, this takes about 5 minutes. Scrape the butter that’s sprayed up the sides of the bowl and make sure it’s all combined.
- Add the powdered sugar (sift if lumpy) and mix at the lowest speed until combined to prevent redecorating your kitchen in a cloud of sugar. You may need to scrape the bottom and sides of your bowl to get it fully combined.
- Add the freeze-dried strawberries to a food processor and pulse on high until it’s a fine powder. If you don’t have a food processor, put the freeze-dried strawberries in a gallon freezer bag and use a rolling pin to crush the strawberries into a fine powder.
- Add the strawberry dust and vanilla extract to the powdered sugar and butter mixture. Start at a low speed until the dust is mostly incorporated and then you can crank it up to start whipping the frosting to the consistency you like. I added about 2 tablespoons of milk to mine to thin it out. Don’t go crazy adding the milk though or you’ll have to add more powdered sugar to counter this.
- Once the frosting is nice and fluffy add the frosting to a piping bag with a decorative tip. I suggest using a tip with a wider opening, so the bits of strawberry don’t get stuck in the teeth.
- Once the cupcakes are completely cooled you can remove a bit from the center of each cupcake using a cupcake corer (I used a strawberry hulling spoon because that’s what I could find)
- Fill each cupcake with the strawberry ganache. You can put the ganache in a piping bag with the tip cut off or you can use a spoon to spoon the ganache into the holes.
- Pipe swirls into the top of the cupcakes starting in the middle where the hole is and making your way outward.
- You can top them with sprinkles, chocolate shavings or slices of strawberries for a garnish.
Cupcakes:
Ganache:
Strawberry Buttercream Frosting:
Assembling the Cupcakes:
Notes
- If you don’t have black cocoa powder or Dutch process cocoa powder regular cocoa powder will be fine. Dutch process is just a better quality.
- If you don’t want to do strawberry chocolate ganache you can just do chocolate ganache or fill the cupcakes with extra frosting.
- It really does matter to the process to have the sour cream and eggs at room temperature. It helps everything come together nice and smooth. One hack I have used is putting the eggs in a cup of warm/hot water for about 10 minutes or longer. I’ve also put the measuring cup of sour cream on the stove while the oven preheats to get the temperature to come up quicker.
chocolate, strawberry, cupcake, ganache, filled cupcake, buttercream
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