Strawberry White Chocolate Cupcakes: The Cheater Edition

Because General Zod has now figured out how to crawl around his parents’ condo, Atlas had to do some quick reorganizing to get certain things away from his little graspy fingers, and as a result, she unloaded a number of pantry items on me when she ran out of room. One of these items was a box of cake mix.  I don’t normally use cake mix, but I hated to waste it, so I came up with these cheater cupcakes the other day.  They were both a success and somewhat of a failure, as I’ll show you in a minute.

I started by chopping up some delightful fresh local strawberries, about 2 cups’ worth.

Then I preheated the oven to 350°F and lined my sole muffin tin with cupcake liners.

I only have the one muffin tin at the moment, though, and the cake box makes 24 cupcakes, so I decided to experiment.  I put the other 12 liners in a 9″ x 13″ baking pan and wedged them together with parchment paper.  I figured they’d come out slightly misshapen, probably more square than round.

Then I prepared the cake batter according to the box instructions.  I did add an extra shot of vanilla, just for flavour.

Then tipped in the strawberries as well as a package of white chocolate chips.

I scooped the batter into the cupcake liners and baked them for about 24 minutes.

They came out nice and brown.

And the others came out like this.  Whoops.

While they cooled I whipped up some cream cheese icing: 1 cup butter, 1 250g package plain cream cheese (both at room temperature), a dash of vanilla, and 2 cups icing sugar.

Then I used the icing to cover up my mistakes!

I sprinkled on a bit of coloured sugar I had lying around, and gathered some fresh lemon balm from my herb garden.  A half strawberry on top adds the finishing touch.

And this is my attempt at the other ones.  NAILED IT.  At least they tasted good.