Strawberry Cupcakes

I mentioned in a previous post about dear son's birthday celebrations, yes he had 2 celebrations! Lucky boy. Besides the celebration with close family members where I made him a Strawberry Shortcake, he also had another celebration at his Childcare Centre. Initially was thinking whether it was necessary, but it seems like a norm at his CCC (based on the party packs he received). Being a kiasu mummy, I didn't want him to miss out this moment of "glory" so celebration there shall be!

So this mummy had to bake some 40 cupcakes (for all the kids + teachers) and hunt for suitable party packs. Didn't want the usual party packs consisting of snacks and poppers, this perfectionist mummy wanted something different and special, so made a trip to Daiso and found something nice and practical. For the cake, since he already had a cake during the previous celebration, cupcakes would be something different and probably more manageable to distribute to the kids.

As for the flavour, would it be vanilla, chocolate or lychee? In the end, decided on strawberry cupcakes for economies of scale. I could use scrapes from the Strawberry Shortcake to make the strawberry puree for the cupcakes. Nice! Since dear son loves strawberries so much, he won't mind having more. And I've bookmarked Evan's Strawberry Cupcake recipe for some time already, now's the chance to try it :)

The steps were fairly quick and easy but I made a few minor changes like reducing amount of sugar (even though she had already reduced the sugar in the first place); as I didn't have any vanilla sugar I substituted with vanilla bean paste and instead of folding chopped strawberries into the batter I added them manually to ensure the amount of strawberries in each cupcake was equal.

The cupcakes turned out beautifully, very moist and tender with a tinge of strawberry fragrance. Alas the strawberry swiss meringue buttercream didn't turn out well though. I underwhipped the cream and hence the cream was still very soft when I piped them onto the cupcakes. Didn't have time to re-do another batch so had to make do with whatever I had. I thought they looked more like normal whipped cream then buttercream. This is not the first time that my buttercream was under-whipped, I always seem to have buttercream problem -_- More practise needed!!!

Overall I thought the cupcakes still looked quite presentable, especially with this Wilton cupcake holder.

Anyways, I think the kids at my son's CCC liked the cupcakes, most of them finished their share and some even asked for more. *Phew* Just glad that the celebration was over and things went quite smoothly. I wonder how many more years am I supposed to do this? LOL!