Strawberries and Cream Cupcakes

Strawberries and cream cupcakes are made using my best vanilla cupcakes filled with a creamy strawberry filling and frosted with strawberry cream cheese frosting!

How to make strawberries and cream cupcakes

There’s like a million strawberry cupcake recipes out there and to be honest, it’s incredibly difficult to get a good strawberry flavor in your cake, while preserving the tender texture of cupcakes. 

There’s a few ways to incorporate strawberries into cake or cupcakes, like roasting them, pureeing and reducing them, baking them straight into the cake like I did with these strawberry mojito cupcakes or using them fresh! Although those mojito cupcakes are pretty darn good, I still prefer that fresh strawberry flavor. 

My strawberries and cream cupcakes use my favorite vanilla cupcake recipe filled with a chunky strawberry cream filling and frosted with a subtle strawberry cream cheese frosting. 

The BEST vanilla cupcakes

I told you I had a bunch of cupcake recipes coming at you and most of them use this base recipe. I tested this vanilla cupcake recipe like a million times and have adapted it in so many different ways.

You can also use my small batch cupcake recipe to make a small batch of these strawberries and cream cupcakes.

The unfortunate thing is that cupcakes aren’t very forgiving like regular cakes. If you just overfill or underfill the muffin pans slightly, they won’t be as beautifully domed (but they’ll still taste great!). 

Ingredients:

• Cake Flour: I’m not a huge cake flour fanatic for regular cakes but for cupcakes, I feel it is more important.
  • But even more important than using cake flour is measuring the flour accurately. I HIGHLY recommend a digital scale. They’re so much more accurate, super affordable, and reduce the amount of dishes. 
• Sugar: I use granulated sugar for this recipe and PLEASE don’t reduce the amount of sugar and then message me that they didn’t turn out. Sugar is not just used as a sweetener, sugar helps with leavening, moisture and tenderness. 
• Butter & Oil: I use a combination of butter and oil in almost all of my cake recipes because I love the structure and flavor from butter and the moisture from oil. 
• Eggs: I use two egg whites for this recipe because I like my cupcakes to be a nice uniform pale color. This recipe also works using just one whole egg if you prefer that, they will just be slightly more yellow and may brown more on the edges. 
• Milk & Sour Cream: I have tested this recipe with a million and one combinations of milk, sour cream, yogurt, buttermilk, etc. This is my favorite ratio and combination. If you don’t have sour cream, you can replace it with full fat greek yogurt. 

Easy Cream Cheese frosting

Cream cheese frosting is very simple to make. It’s the same as American buttercream, where you just whip the butter and cream cheese together for a few minutes, then add in the powdered sugar and any flavors you want. 

I like to beat the frosting for 5-10 minutes after adding the powdered sugar just to make sure the sugar gets fully dissolved and the frosting is super silky.

The only thing with cream cheese frosting is to be careful with adding in extras, like the strawberry jam. It’s already a very soft frosting so extra liquid will make it softer. I like to refrigerate my cream cheese frosting for 30 minutes once it’s done, then whip it again and pipe. 

Strawberry Cream Filling

This is the star of the show. Strawberries and cream cupcakes would not be strawberries and cream cupcakes without the strawberries and cream. Lol, that’s a mouthful 🤣. This is basically just part of the cream cheese frosting mixed with fresh strawberry chunks and as you can see from the images, I filled the cupcakes as high as I could! 

Storing cupcakes

How to make cupcake ahead of time

If you bake the cupcakes ahead of time, store them in an airtight container or fully covered at room temperature overnight. If it’s longer than one night, freeze them and bring them back to room temperature when frosting.

The frosting can be made 1-2 days in advance (without the strawberries) but it needs to be fully covered and refrigerated. Bring it back to room temperature to get a spreadable consistency before trying to frost and then add the strawberries to the filling when you’re assembling the cupcakes.

In my opinion, it’s just easier to make the frosting fresh.

How to store finished cupcakes

Once the cupcakes are done, refrigerate them for 30-60 minutes until the frosting firms up. Then cover them completely in an airtight container or wrapped in plastic wrap. Because this has cream cheese frosting, I recommend storing them in the refrigerator. They can be refrigerated for 7-10 days but keep in mind the cupcake will slowly dry out with time so I recommend freezing after 1-2 days. 

Can I freeze the cupcakes

Personally, I don’t like freezing anything with fruit in it. I find that it just makes it kind of soggy so I don’t recommend freezing them.

Thanks so much for reading today’s post. If you have any questions just comment down below and make sure to tag me @baranbakery on instagram if you make these cupcakes. If you’re looking for more strawberry cupcake recipes, my strawberry mojito cupcakes have strawberries in the batter! As always, have a blessed day and happy baking!

Love, B