In Season: Strawberries

I love when Strawberries are in Season in California, because you can find them everywhere and I do mean everywhere! From farmers markets, the local grocery store and even on the street corner. This year I wanted to take advantage of them being in season and so affordable, I decided to try out a few new recipes and put my own simple twist on them. 


Strawberry Lemon Bread

I really like lemon bread, and thought combining fresh lemons (juice) with fresh strawberries would be oh so tasty! One problem, I've never made lemon bread before so I looked on Allrecipes.com for a simple recipe that, I could tweak just a little to make my own strawberry lemon bread recipe, and I'm happy to say my experiment worked! Here's the original recipe I used and my adapted recipe is below. 

Ingredients 

• 1/2 cup unslated butter (room temp)
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 large lemons juiced
• 1 cup of fresh strawberrys (diced or sliced) 
• 1 tablespoon of lemon extract 
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract 
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup milk

Bake It


In a electric mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs on at a time, them lemon juice, lemon extract and vanilla extract. Combine flour, baking powder and salt; stir into creamed mixture alternately with milk. Gently toss strawberries in flour and mix in batter (by hand) By now your batter should smell um-mazing. Pour into a greased & floured 8-in. x 4-in. x 2-in. loaf pan. Bake at 350 degrees F for 45 minutes or until bread tests done. My mom taught me if the bread bounces back after you press on it, its done :) Let your bread cool for 5-10 mins in the pan before moving to a wire rack. 

Strawberry Cupcakes 

I've sort of been on a cupcake kick since planning Avery's first birthday party, I made a lot of cupcakes for his party and had so much fun! I wanted to make some yummy cupcakes for my sisters birthday, to take to her and decided to try out Martha Stewart's Strawberry Cupcake Recipe. I cut her recipe in half, and made 14 delicious cupcakes. The recipe below makes 34 cupcakes.


My pictures of the strawberry bread I took in natural light, I'm going to do my best to always take food pics in natural light, its amazing what a huge difference it makes! :) Hopefully your ba able to see how tasty these cupcakes were, my sis loved them! :)

Ingredients  

2 3/4 all purpose flour
1/2 cup of cake flour
1 tablespoon of baking powder
1 teaspoon of salt
1 cup of unsalted butter (two sticks) room temp
2 1/4 cup of sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
3 large eggs, plus one egg white 
1 cup of milk
2 cups of finely chopped strawberries (plus additional of garnish)


Bake It
Preheat oven to 350 degrees, line muffin tins with paper liners. Sift together both flours, I shifted 2x. Cream butter and sugar and vanilla together using an electric mixer until pale and fluffy. And eggs, egg white one at a time. On low speed add in half of the flour mixture, then half of milk alternating untill well combined. Fold in chopped strawberries by hand (with a spoon :)) Divide batter until baking cups until 3/4 full. Bake for 25-30 minutes until cake tester comes out clean. Place cupcake tins on wire rack for 15 mins, then carefully remove cupcakes from tin and place on wire rack, let them cool completely before frosting. 


Frosting 
The cupcakes turned out amazing! Seriously this is a good recipe to try out! Instead of making her Strawberry Merange Frosting, which sounded good but to complicated, I made a different strawberry frosting. I made a small batch of cream cheese frosting, again using Martha's recipe and added fresh chopped strawberries and blended my frosting really well then I cut a few larger pumper strawberries in half and squeezed the juice into the frosting. I continued to blend my frosting until it turned the palest shade of pink. Click here for a basic cream cheese frosting recipe.

What's your favorite thing to bake of make when strawberries are in season? If you have a strawberry recipe you'd like me to try out, email me or send me the link :) 


Oh I'm now on Instagram, @Mrsclh so far I'm loving it it:) I only have a few pics but should be fun to share pics of our everyday life :)