Carrot Cake Cupcakes

To mark the end of birthday season, we invited a group of friends to play ping pong downtown, and have snacks, drinks, and cupcakes. Of course, being the baker that I am, I made three kinds of cupcakes with three kinds of frosting.

The default was obviously chocolate with mint frosting. I used the same Cook’s Illustrated cupcake that we’ve been making for the past 15 years. This time, I made the ganache centre, then paired it with a fresh mint-infused cream that I used to make white chocolate ganache.

However, the surprise hit was a strawberry cupcake with strawberry frosting. This recipe called for underripe berries, which I thought would still be too wet. But Dr. S recently bought some dried, sweetened strawberries and I threw that in. The intensity of this product led several people to come up to me throughout the evening and comment on how delicious those cupcakes were!

Finally, I made this NYT Cooking recipe for a carrot cake cupcake. To keep it simple, I didn’t add any nuts or raisins. It turned out as expected, nothing fancy, just familiar.