Strawberry Colada Cupcakes!!

This week I made a strawberry colada cupcake, this one didn't have alcohol in it so I didn't enjoy a large pina colada like I did last week when I made my mimosa cupcakes. I know I could have, but it since I didn't have those ingredients out I decided not too, I work on Sundays too, getting a bit tipsy before work probably isn't the best idea.

I had a mini crisis when I was making these cupcakes, I read through the recipe earlier in the week to be sure I had all the ingredients, but I didn't read it closely enough. I'm still an amateur baker, I love to do it and I'm pretty good at it, but by all means I am not expert. That brings us to my dilemma, did you know about cake flour? I have never paid attention to the fact that there are different types of flower, I know about the different sugar types, but I never paid attention to flour. I should have known, it's call all purpose flour, so clearly there are flours for other purposes. I got a late start on these cupcakes, and I don't have a grocery store that close to me so when I noticed cake flour my heart sank. Thankfully my detective skills found a substitution! If you need cake flour you can sift regular flour! I really didn't want to do that though, so I kept looking and found something much easier. Remember this one its a great tip! If your recipe calls for a cup of cake flour, take a cup of regular flour and take our 2 tablespoons and this will equal out to the cup of cake flour. Crisis averted!

This was one of the more complicated recipes I've done, so I made a bit of a mess, but I didn't get any pictures of it. I think I used about 3 or 4 bowls and I needed the blender to puree the fresh strawberries that are in both the cake and the frosting, and the electric hand mixer to mix all of my ingredients. I hate cleaning up, and this was a big clean up. So worth it though! I love how good my house smells when I'm baking, and the combination of strawberries, pineapples and coconut made my house smell yummy :)

Its funny, as often as I bake, I always think its so cool how all of this:

Turns into this:

I really cant take the credit for how cute the frosting is, my mom took over that part. My mom usually acts as my assistant when I'm making my cupcakes, but my parents went into Boston for the weekend so I had to get started without her. I was praying she'd be home in time to help me frost the cupcakes, I am awful at frosting cupcakes. If I'm just going to frost them with a knife, I'm fine; but if its anything fancy, forget it! Last week we had multiple frosting malfunctions, I have some weird metal contraption that my aunt gave my for Christmas a few years ago that usually works, but it was giving a lot of trouble last week. We decided to try a plastic pastry bag which worked for about 1 cupcake before exploding. So my mom had my dad stop at Crate & Barrel on their way home and she bought me this:

An actual pastry bag set! I was so excited, but I still need a lot of practice, my hands were very shaky so my mom frosted most of them. We had another hit on our hands, they disappeared very quickly at work and I heard nothing but great things from everyone who tried them. Its so nice to hear people say they love what you're baking, its a lot of work and nice to know its appreciated, its fun too! Its been suggested I do something chocolaty for next week, I haven't decided what do make just yet, but I'll be sure to post what I decide. I think I'm going to be doing a lot of baking this week, I'm going to make some cupcake balls shortly which I'll share later.

Happy Baking!!