Fresh Strawberry Cupcakes

 I felt like I needed a break from the dreary winter weather recently, and with strawberries on special at the local Coles, why not use them for some summery cupcakes?
These are beautiful moist vanilla cupcakes, studded throughout with fresh strawberries.
And what better to top them with than strawberry whipped cream?

 This cream is super easy to make, it's simply a case of whipping a cup of cream, and adding some sugar to sweeten it up. Then grab your food processor (I have a tupperware happy chopper that I use!) to mush up half a punnet or so of strawberries. Mix it all together and you have a bowl of AWESOMENESS that you will want to polish off with a spoon before your cupcakes have cooled!

Next time you need to be reminded of warmer weather, definitely make these!

Fresh Strawberry Cupcakes
Ingredients
125g butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
Pinch of salt
1/3 cup milk
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups chopped fresh strawberries

Method
- Preheat oven to 180 celcius, line cupcake pan with liners
- Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy
- Add eggs and vanilla until well combined
- Whisk flour, baking powder and salt together in a seperate bowl
- Add flour mixture into the butter mix in 3 batches, alternating with the milk.
- Fold in strawberries

Fill cupcake liners 3/4 full, bake for 15-20 minutes

Strawberry Whipped Cream
Ingredients
1 cup of thickened cream
1/3 cup of sugar
4 tablespoons of mushed up strawberries (roughly chop a handful of strawberries and then blend until mushy - I use a tupperware happy chopper!)

Method
- Whip the cream with a handheld mixer/stand mixer until it resembles whipped cream
- Mix in the sugar until dissolved
- Mix in the strawberries until just combined

28 today..

Taking a break from the tail end of my 12 days off to blog, cos it's been so long - I'm clearly not good at doing this regularly!
As the title suggests, it's my birthday today. I've always hated having my birthday 10 days after Christmas, and as a child I'd have birthday parties that would be VERY small due to the other kids being on holidays. These days I work around people where possible, but as I'm content with small celebrations, it's no big deal.
Today I started the day with lots of pressies from Mr Monkei, including a new camera which will hopefully make my product shots a LOT better (no pressure camera) and a heap of gorgeous scented stuff from The Body Shop - this is luxury in my world!

After a thunderstorm this morning, the sun came out and we headed off.

We started off at Mum's for more pressies including some Wilton icing tips I wanted -I'm keen to master cookies this year and will definitely post the results.

Afterwards we went out for a lunch at a cafe we hadn't tried yet in Warrandyte.


The home made wedges were beautiful!

We then wandered around Montsalvat in Eltham, which Mr hadn't seen before. So many pretty things to photograph - heaven for someone playing around with a shiny new camera. I hadn't realised how outdated my camera was, it's 6 years old now and really showing its age. We hadn't realised till we got the photos printed from last week's trip interstate.


Beautiful place!

I'm now sipping on a glass of wine that we picked up on the trip, and looking forward to dinner out. I've definitely been spoilt!

Will be back very soon to the (not quite) regularly scheduled blogging of pretty things and cookery...

How have you all spent your break?