Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes With Strawberry Filling

           For quite sometime now, I wanted to try out cupcakes with some filling inside, but being the lazy me, I didn't do it until now. Well, this time I was paired with Janani Krishnakumaar of Red Chilly Curry for the 'Shhhh Cooking Secretly' challenge, she gave me chocolate and strawberries as the two ingredients. After some thought, I decided to make these cupcakes with strawberry filling. I decided to make the cupcakes vegan and made the filling with fresh strawberries ( my next post ), of course, you can use any fruit preserve or store bought jam or jelly instead of the strawberry filling. Though I have called them cupcakes, I didn't make them too sweet, you could have a couple of them for breakfast too, they were moist, soft and delicious..

Need To Have

• All Purpose Flour/Maida - 3/4 cup
• Unsweetened Cocoa Powder - 11/2 tablespoon
• Granulated Sugar - 1/2 cup
• Oil - 1/4 cup
• Orange Juice - 1/2 cup
• Baking Soda - 1/2 teaspoon
• Baking Powder - 1/2 teaspoon
• Vanilla Extract - 1/2 teaspoon
• Salt - a pinch
• Strawberry Jelly/Jam - for filling the cupcakes

Method

          Take the orange juice, oil, sugar, salt and vanilla extract, and beat it till the sugar dissolves a little. Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and baking soda together and add it to the wet ingredients and mix it up.

          Spoon it into a greased muffin pan and bake it at 190 C for 20 to 25 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes, remove the cakes from the pan and cool it completely.

          Once cooled, take a cupcake, scoop out the center part, spoon in a little strawberry filling and close it with the scooped top ( only with the top half of it ) and press it well.

          Dust some icing sugar and serve.

Note
I have used homemade strawberry filling.
Once you fill up the cake with the fruit filling, we can't leave it out for more than a day.
I have used a murukku acchu as a stencil while dusting with the icing sugar.