Strawberry season is on and every year I want to bake all the strawberry desserts and cakes I think of. This year I discovered these cupcakes and I already made them twice (and honestly I think I might bake them once more before strawberries are gone). The award for the biggest surprise of this strawberry season definitely goes to them.

And I wouldn’t be probably thinking about making them if I could just get all purpose gluten free flour in a store as always. But a few weeks ago all gluten free flour just disappeared from stores and all I found was the last bag of brown rice flour. I got it not being sure how I am going to use it and then I found it. Strawberry muffins. I adjusted the recipe and decided to promote them to cupcakes.

What you need for a dozen cupcakes:

• 1 cup brown rice flour
• 1/2 cup ground walnuts
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 2 tea spoons baking powder
• 1/4 tea spoon xanthan (optional)
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 (not completely full) cup milk or yoghurt
• 2 eggs
• cca 150g fresh strawberries

For the cream:

• mascarpone 250g
• cream 250g
• sugar

Before you start

• I really like the brown rice flour here. But if you want to replace it with white rice flour, I think it would also work.
• I use the flour- walnut rule like in the carrot cake. That means if you want to use less walnuts (or none), add more flour and vice versa. Just make sure it makes 1 cup and a half together. Also I don’t recommend to use more walnuts than flour.
• I put xanthan as a “glue”. It’s not absolutely necessary.
• You can either use milk or yoghurt or mix it together “half-half” as I did 🙂

Let’s bake

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C.
2. Prepare cupcake form and line it with cupcake liners.
3. Prepare the strawberries: cut them into small pieces.
4. In one bowl, whisk wet ingredients together: first eggs and milk/yoghurt and then add the oil. It doesn’t have to be absolutely smooth, just until the ingredients are combined.
5. In a bigger bowl, mix all the dry ingredients: flour, walnuts, sugar, baking powder, xanthan.
6. Now pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones. Mix together with a spoon or a spatula until you have smooth batter.
7. Add the strawberry pieces and slightly mix them into the batter.

8. With a spoon, divide the batter into the cupcake forms.
9. Bake about 25-30 minutes, depending on your oven. They should grow and be nicely golden on the top 🙂
10. When they cool down a bit, remove them from the tray and transfer them on a cooling rack.

11. When they cool down, prepare the cream: in a bowl beat mascarpone and fresh cream together with sugar using electric mixer. Transfer the cream in a piping bag and decorate your cupcakes 🙂

More tips

• If you omit the cream, they are delicious as breakfast muffins.
• The second time I made them I decided to put some strawberry flavour into the cream. I used freeze dried strawberries for that: I simply threw them into a food processor and blended them into a powder and then I added a few tea spoons of it in the cream. It worked magically. The cream was light pink and actually it tasted like artificial flavouring but it was real 😀 Highly recommended 🙂