Koko's Kitchen: Vanilla Cupcakes with Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting

Hey guys, before I get into this post, just wanted to let you know that there have been several problems with blogger this past week. I did post a gluten free Wednesday post on Wednesday, then was not able to access blogger for 2 days. When it was finally back, there was a notice saying that a lot of blog posts that were posted on Wednesday - my gluten free Wednesday blog post! - were removed, and that they would try to put them all back. I of course immediately forgot about this and posted my blog post on Friday, when I then noticed that my post wasn't there from Wednesday! So, to make a short story long, my post was removed during all of the work that was being done, and I will repost the same post this coming Wednesday.

This was the idea of my former coworker M. There was a point in the first few months of the year when the produce department was ordering too many strawberries, charging a ton, a obviously not selling nearly enough. So, their strawberries were going bad fast. And when they even begin to look wilty, they can't use them. So, what to do, but give them to the bakery department. We made pretty things there that used strawberries, right? Sure, and we appreciated the strawberries as first, but it became pretty ridiculous pretty fast. They would literally bring us a case a day - a case being about 24 one pound containers of organic strawberries that were on the verge of turning. And you know how perishable strawberries are, right?

We were desperately trying to think of things to make with the strawberries and M came up with the idea of a Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting. The Cream Cheese Frosting is by far the best frosting we have, and the additional of strawberries makes it out of this world! So, she made a vanilla cupcake as the base, blended some fresh strawberries until they became a puree, then folded the strawberry puree into the prepared Cream Cheese Frosting and viola Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting! She put the frosting back into the cooler to set up, then frosted the cupcakes with the frosting and placed a fresh strawberry slice on each cupcake as a garnish. So beautiful! Unfortunately, since this isn't my recipe, but rather Lifethyme's cupcake and frosting recipe and M's addition, I can't put the recipes here, but you can easily follow a traditional recipe for dairy cream cheese frosting and just substitute the butter for Earth Balance and the cream cheese for Tofutti Cream Cheese. Easy. And Tasty! These can also easily be made gluten free by just making a gluten free vanilla base cupcake and following the above instructions/suggestions from the frosting.