For this from-scratch strawberry cupcake recipe, lots of cupcakes were tested and tasted. I was determined to make a perfect strawberry cupcake to go with a strawberry frosting I developed a couple of years ago. The trick is not using a purée, as I do when making frosting. Rather, I grind freeze-dried strawberries into a powder yields great results — it brought this cupcake recipe out of my test kitchen and into my recipe box!
Ingredients
- ¼ ounces freeze-dried strawberries: 1 piece
- all-purpose flour: 0.75 cup
- cake flour: 0.75 cup
- ½ teaspoons baking powder: 1 piece
- baking soda: 0.25 tsp
- salt: 0.5 tsp
- unsalted butter, room temperature: 0.5 cup
- ⅓ cups white sugar: 1 piece
- eggs, room temperature: 3 piece
- vanilla extract: 1 tsp
- whole milk, room temperature: 0.66667 cup
Metric Conversion
Stages of cooking
-
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Line muffin tins with 20 cupcake liners.
-
Grind strawberries into a fine powder using a coffee grinder or food processor. Whisk strawberry powder, all-purpose flour, cake flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a bowl.
-
Beat butter and sugar in a bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Mixture should be noticeably lighter in color. Add room-temperature eggs one at a time, allowing each egg to blend into butter mixture before adding the next. Beat in vanilla extract.
-
Stir flour mixture alternately with milk into butter mixture until just incorporated. Fill lined tins with cupcake batter.
-
Bake in preheated oven until cupcakes spring back when gently touched with a fingertip or a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 16 to 18 minutes.