Cupcakes for the Auction

Cupcakes

What did I do on my Friday day off?

Glad you should ask.  Well I spent the day pulling together cupcakes for the dinner auction at my son's school that will occur in a few short hours from now.  I tried a new recipe my sister pinned for me on Pinterest. Strawberry Shortcake Cupcakes the recipe called for many ingredients. Some of which are posted here.

I chose to use a cute cupcake liner that is from Paula Dean's line of merchandise. I found these at Michael's in their dollar bins. Super cute.

The very first thing I did was to line the cupcake pan! 

These are just some of the ingredients that were used to make the cupcake batter. Cake flour, unbleached all purpose flour, baking powder, salt, and of course sugar were mixed together with the butter and

eggs, whole milk and vanilla extract.  Pour the wet ingredients in with the dry ingredients and you have a cupcake batter to mix and ready to pour 2/3's full in the cupcake liners.  As always I have to taste. Yummy already. 

Once done let them cool for a while.

FROSTING

If you ask my son he will tell you that the best thing about cupcakes is the frosting and I couldn't agree more! This frosting calls for  butter (unsalted again), Salt (a pinch I would say) confectioners sugar and vanilla. 

Mix with a hand held mixer to make sure it is well mixed. I think this worked better than using the Kitchenaid  this time around.  Once those ingredients are blended well add strawberry jam to taste.  And it tastes good. I added three tablespoons of Strawberry Jam and the frosting was perfect.  

 Cupcake Filling?

 Some cupcakes have filling. They are the ones with surprises in them. In this particular cupcake I put fresh strawberries inside the cake after the cake was baked.  Here are the strawberries whole and diced.

 Once you have prepped your strawberries and your cupcakes are cooled (If you needed to you could probably cool the cupcakes in the fridge to speed up the cooling process) you need to bore a hole in the cupcake in order to fill it with diced strawberries. I used a piping tip one of my bigger ones, and placed it three quarters of the way down the center of the cupcake as seen above.  This worked great! Then I filled the cupcakes with diced strawberries as seen below.

Ready to frost.  I cleaned up the same tip that I used to bore the hole in order to place the strawberries inside the cake, cleaned it up and then filled my washable piping bag full of the strawberry frosting and began frosting the cupcakes!

Finally I placed a cut strawberry on top for decoration.  Of course I had extras and wanted to make sure these were good. AND they were!

I think they turned out great! 

 Silent Auction Item

 Because these cupcakes were going to be in the silent auction at my son's school, I wanted to package them up in a super cute way. So I bought boxes to place them in and then put a decorative ribbon on them. See below.

 Sorry this section is a little heavy on pictures. But you get the point. Super cute items up for auction.  When I arrived at the auction I went to see how many people were bidding on these items as a collection.  There were several already.  Someone walked away with 1 dozen cupcakes for $25.  The deserts were brought to your table and of course at our table someone bought a desert so we shared it.  A yummy chocolate trifle is what we ate!