Chocolate Strawberry Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

May I nominate these chocolate strawberry filled cupcakes to be your Valentine's Day/date night/indulgent dessert recipe? Not only do they look fancy 💅🏻, but they're actually super simple to make!

I used my new (well, newish) chocolate cupcake recipe, but cored each cupcake and filled them with strawberry jam! If you really wanted an even more indulgent cupcake experience, you could fill them with Nutella (ok, I'm doing this next!!)

Each cupcake is then topped with strawberry cream cheese frosting. Look, I love regular American buttercream, but mixing freeze-dried strawberries with cream cheese icing is seriously next level.

If you're more of a raspberry lover, I basically recreated the same recipe but with raspberries over on my raspberry filled chocolate cupcake recipe!

Grab Your Ingredients!

• Freeze-Dried Strawberries: You can find these online or at some grocery stores like Trader Joe's. You can either buy them already as a powder or whole. If you're buying them whole or as little bits (like you can see above!), you'll need to blend them into a fine powder.
• Cocoa Powder: Make sure you're using natural unsweetened cocoa powder and not Dutch-processed cocoa powder. Dutch-processed cocoa powder reacts differently with baking soda, so the cupcakes wouldn't rise as much.
• Oil: Use a neutral oil like vegetable oil or canola oil. Using this instead of butter will keep the cupcakes soft for days!
• Sour Cream: Adding sour cream will add more fat to the cupcakes, keeping them super soft and moist.

Let's Make These Cupcakes!

Step 1: Preheat the oven and line the cupcake pan with liners. In a large bowl, whisk all of the dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl or jug, whisk the wet ingredients (except the water!) together.

Step 2: Pour the wet ingredients in the dry ingredients and whisk until almost combined. Then pour in the hot water (hot water is going to bloom the cocoa powder, making it more chocolatey).

Step 3: Fill the cupcake liners so they're less than ¾ full. If you fill them too much, they'll overflow in the oven! Bake in the oven for 18-20 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes, then remove to a wire cooling rack.

Step 4: When completely cool, core the cupcakes. I like to use a large piping tip to do this! Press the bottom of a piping tip into the center of each cupcake. Then spoon in your strawberry jam.

Step 5: In a large bowl, whisk the heavy cream with the salt, vanilla, and sugar until it looks like Greek yogurt. Add the cream cheese and strawberry powder and mix on high-speed for 3 minutes, until thick with peaks.

Step 6: Frost each cupcake with the strawberry cream cheese frosting and enjoy!