Fruity-Fruit-Fruit!

Fresh lemons after they have been zest (ed) and squeezed

If you are a frequent visitor of The Cupcake Cottage then you will know that we, almost always, offer a fruit flavor cupcake each day we bake.  This past week I had someone ask about our strawberry and the 'tiny bits' that are in the cake.  I gave an explanation and did not think much more about the question until a day or two later someone else asked the same thing.  Interesting....  Before I knew it, I kicked into 'teacher mode' and started doing some research.  I trust that my precious mom and dad rest with added peace knowing that my TCU degree from the College of Education has not one to waste even though I left the teaching profession to operate my own baking business.


Firstly, each of our fruit recipe is slightly different from flavor to flavor.  With our LEMON we zest fresh lemons, then squeeze the juice from the lemons and add a hint of pure lemon oil to the batter.  Same goes for our KEY LIME.  For BANANA we take our fresh bananas and store them in the freezer (a little trick I learned years ago) so that when it is time to bake we take the frozen bananas, let them thaw and voila!  They are a perfect consistency for mushing them up in the batter.

We use an unsweetened APPLESAUCE for our applesauce cupcake, pink lemonade concentrate for our PINK LEMONADE, and for BLUEBERRY we pop fresh blueberries in the batter and let them bake whole.  Wen we have PEACH on the menu you know that those peaches have come from a Texas harvest, preferably Parker County.  We peel each fresh peach and slice it up into little chunks and gently fold them into the batter, unlike our strawberry.  

Fresh strawberries ready to be rinsed, dried and blended

Pureed strawberry ready to be poured into the batter

 Which leads to that question I was asked earlier in the week about our STRAWBERRY cupcake.  Our strawberry flavor is achieved from fresh strawberries and nothing more.  We take our strawberries, cut them up, place them in a blender and puree  them.  We then pour this scrumptious puree into our batter.  The batter, along with the baked cupcake, will have little tiny flecks which are nothing more than proof of freshness.   You see, those little bits are teeny-tiny seeds!  Did you know that one strawberry can have as many as 200 of these bitty seeds?  The seeds of a strawberry actually grow on the outside of the fruit.  Yes, I became so curious I read about all sorts of little strawberry facts.  Every so often this freshly pureed fruit will take on a blueish/purple color for reasons unknown to us.  Added proof that we allow nature to take it's course in our kitchen. Here are two great links with additional details in case you are interested:
Strawberry Festival held in London (Ohio)
Strawberry Facts from 'Pick Your Own'


So there you have it, a little bit of information about some of our much loved Fruity Flavored Cupcakes!