I am practicing my scratch baking....it is a work in progress....

I made strawberry cupcakes today based on a recipe in Martha Stewart's Cupcakes book. It was pretty good, but the strawberries available are not yet really sweet and don't have a strong strawberry flavor ( I think it's because we had a nice, wet winter).

Anyway, I would like a little more sweetness and strawberry flavor. What would help be get this? Would a something like LorAnn (?) flavor or Torani syrup help? I'm not sure which direction to go. And I have heard that many Strawberry flavorings can be pretty gross. I am not focused on the non-processed, healthier part of scratch baking so suggest at will- I just want to try to have a couple of recipes that don't start with a mix in my repetoir

I have found that playing around w/ different things also is fun, the hubby gets to eat my experiments! I have made cakes using jello in order to get the flavor and color I was looking for, don't use a whole pack, it adds a funny twang to the batter. The lorann oil or the syrup would be good to use to get a nice flavor. make a batch, divide it up and add different stuff to each batch to see which one you like better. HTH!!

I have not tried the Lorann Strawberries and I made the cupcakes a few weeks ago for Easter that you are talking about. I am going to try it again, but this time with frozen berries when berries here are not quite ripe enough. They are picked right at the peak of being nice an sweet so they might give more flavor. I also though the cake was a bit dry so I figured the juice might be good to add just a tiny bit of it in. I am going to make them again in a couple weeks though, this week working on to many other projects to try them again right now.