I decided to pinch a few pennies this year and make the cupcakes for my birthday dinner, instead of buying them from Icing on the Cake like I normally do (best cupcakes, but at 3.25 apiece, and around 10-15 people to feed, it adds up!).  So, I went to the store and stocked up on white cake mix, strawberries, Hershey’s chocolate and Scharffen Berger unsweetened natural cocoa powder. I chopped up the strawberries and mixed them into the white cake mix along with 2 drops of pink food coloring.  Then I poured the mix into cupcake cups (a little over 2/3 full) and added a slice of strawberry to the top.

Bake as directed on the white cake mix (350 degrees for 16 minutes) and let cool.

For the chocolate buttercream, I started with the buttercream recipe on the back of the C&H powdered confectioner’s sugar box.

1 lb box of Powdered sugar
1 stick of unsalted sweet cream butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 C milk

Mix all ingredients together in an electric mixer on medium speed for 2-3 minutes. After that, I added 1/2 cup unsweetened chocolate powder, and Hershey’s syrup to taste. You may need to add a little more milk to get the desired creaminess.

Mmm, the best part!!

I don’t have any icing bags, so I took an extra larger ziploc bag, filled with the frosting and cut a small tip off the corner.  It doesn’t make the frosting pretty, but it gets the cupcakes frosted much more quickly.

I used candy Pearls and chocolate chips to make them look cute, and wrapped some Wilton’s cake wraps around them. I found the wraps at Target in the Halloween section. They were supposed to be some kind of cemetery design, but I thought they looked a little like crowns, hee hee.

My experiment worked! The cupcakes tasted delicious YAYYYY!!!