Chocolate strawberry mochi cupcakes

I'm currently about six weeks out from my big move to Boston. I've bought my one-way ticket, secured my apartment, and am compiling a list of places to eat and things to do for the city. The biggest challenge for me is getting all my stuff across the country. Simply put, I've just collected too many possessions over these last two years in San Francisco - and now I've got to decide what I really want.

There is still time to think about all of these things though, so in the meantime, I'm just baking along at my normal pace. For this week's recipe, I didn't have too much time to whip up something, so these cupcakes are a bit of a "leftover ingredients" invention. I had quite a few components already made up and leftover from previous recipes, so I decided just to throw everything into the mixing bowl.

The cupcake itself is my standard mochi cupcake recipe - as my go-to recipe, I've made the original green tea/red bean version quite a few times, but I've also experimented with other filling/frosting combinations (like this chocolate raspberry version).

This time, for the filling, I used leftover strawberry preserves from my Fourth of July cupcakes. As for the frosting, I made a standard chocolate buttercream, but as a twist, I actually used my homemade butter (the butter that I accidentally made while trying to make whipped cream). And just to top everything off, I placed a frosting flower on each cupcake, leftover from my Wilton decorating class.

The result was a very appealing cupcake with a great mix of strawberry, chocolate, and mochi! And for surprisingly little effort, which is always a bonus.

Stay tuned for this weekend, where I attempt to take on the most famous chocolate cake in the world...

Chocolate strawberry mochi cupcakes - makes 24-30 cupcakes

• 1 box (16 oz) Mochiko Rice Flour 
• 1¼ cup (250 g)of white sugar 
• 1 tsp baking powder 
• ¼ tsp salt 
• 3 eggs 
• 1½ cup almond milk 
• ¾ cup canola oil 
• 2 tsp vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and grease the tins with canola oil cooking spray. 
2. Whisk all the wet ingredients (egg, milk, oil, vanilla) together. 
3. Mix all of the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, salt) together in a separate bowl. 
4. Add the dry into the wet and stir until just combined. Don't use an electric mixer, just combine it by hand.
5. Fill ~3 Tbsp in each of the tins. 
6. Bake the cupcakes for 30-35 minutes or until the sides starts to turn from yellow to brown.
7. Let the cupcakes cool. Core out the middle of the cupcakes and then fill them with the strawberry preserves (recipe here). Pipe chocolate ganache frosting (recipe here) on top.