Vanilla Cupcakes with Blackberry Filling and Blackberry Frosting

With parties, come desserts.  I eat dessert every day (I know, I know, I need to be better….), but parties are a great excuse for me to be able to make a dessert without feeling guilty–and also to try new dessert recipes.

So, Thursday I mentioned my cousin’s baby shower where our theme was “Purple.”  Nothing else, just purple.  As we talked more about that, however, I told my cousin we really should have some sort of an actual theme.  For some reason, we moved on from shower talk and started talking about having tea parties when we were kids, and she mentioned that would be a fun shower theme.  So off we went with a Purple Tea Party.

I told you how hard it was to find a beverage for the Purple Tea Party, and the Lavender Lemonade recipe was born.  However, the desserts were a bit easier.  My mom and I decided on three variations of dessert, all to be minis in the spirit of tea party fare: chocolate éclairs, cupcakes and lemon tartlets.  My cousin doesn’t love chocolate cake–which is my specialty since it’s my favorite, so instead I went off in search of a vanilla cupcake which would hold up to a “purple” theme nicely.  I looked at the odd ones–rosewater, lavender, and an abundance of berry flavors.  However, the only purple ones were the lavender and I felt having lavender cupcakes AND lavender lemonade was probably a bit too much.  So instead I searched for a vanilla cupcake that could support the purple theme with a great, naturally purple, frosting.  Thus, these Vanilla Cupcakes with Blackberry Filling and Blackberry Frosting were born.

We did these small for the benefit of the Tea Party.  And don’t get me wrong, I love sweets; and for me, the sweeter the better.  So usually I’d suggest making them in a bigger form as well.  However, these really are suuuuuuper sweet, so I think they’re likely to be best in the small cupcake form.  Plus, when they’re small, the blackberries that decorate them really accent the frosting well–they’re the perfect size.  A bigger cupcake’s frosting might sortof drown the berry visually.  By the end, these were a hit, and I decided I just may have to change my “specialty” to vanilla cupcakes with flavored fillings and frostings.  🙂

Enjoy!

These cupcakes are slightly adapted from Just So Tasty.  For those of you who don’t know, I’m Gluten Free so when I make anything baked, I use Cup4Cup flour.  This means that I need to use recipes with all purpose flour.  However, I did some research and it turns out you can make cake flour.  If you’re making regular cupcakes, follow the recipe directly.  If you don’t have the cake flour or you’re using the Gluten Free all purpose, use the notes below.

1 and ¼ cup cake flour*

1 teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt, to taste

½ cup unsalted butter, room temperature

¾ cup granulated sugar

2 egg whites

2 teaspoons vanilla

¼ cup sour cream

½ cup milk. room temperature (2% or whole preferred)

½ teaspoon almond extract

*If you don’t have cake flour on hand, measure 1 and ¼ cups all purpose flour into a medium sized bowl then remove 2 and ½ tablespoons of the flour. Replace the 2 and ½ tablespoons all-purpose flour by adding 2 and ½ tablespoons cornstarch. Whisk the mixture for about 1 minute then sift.

1.    Preheat the oven to 350F degrees and line a mini muffin tin with mini cupcake papers.

2.    In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

3.    Cream together the butter and sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy (about 2-3 minutes), then continue beating and add in the egg whites and vanilla (about another 30 seconds).  I use a stand mixer and love it, but you can absolutely use a hand mixer if that’s what you have. Scrape the sides of the bowl and stir in the sour cream. Add in the flour mixture little by little while mixing on low speed.  Add the milk the same way.  Mix until combined.

4.    Spoon the batter evenly into the lined muffin cavities – filling each about two thirds of the way full.  I use one of those small cookie scoops and fill it about half or two-thirds of the way to try and keep them uniform.  Bake for 9-14 minutes until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Check at 9 or 10 minutes.  Leave to cool in the pan for 5-10 minutes before you take them out of the pan to cool completely for filling and frosting.

1 Jar of the purest Seedless Blackberry Jam you can find.

Put the jam in a piping bag with a small filler tip.  Insert the tip into the top of each cupcake about half way into the cake.  Squeeze the bag until you can feel the jam filling up the hole to the top.

I found this frosting on Garnish and Glaze.

½ cup (1 stick) salted butter, softened

1½ cup powdered sugar

⅛ teaspoon salt

8 ounces (1 stick) cream cheese, softened

1 (6 ounce) container blackberries, washed, divided

¼ teaspoon vanilla

Put the berries in a food processor and process them until smooth.  Strain the berry puree in a large sieve and strain out the seeds.  Mix all ingredients together in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment.  If the frosting is too thin, add more sugar by the tablespoon.  If it’s too thick, add a little milk. Because these were for the “Purple” tea party, I did add a little bit of the violet food gel for color, but if it’s not necessary for the purposes of your theme, there’s no need, the frosting will be beautiful either way.

After you fill and frost the cupcakes, garnish them with a blackberry.  If you want, at the very last second, you can sprinkle with powdered sugar.