My ‘thing’ since I started baking here in the USA, has always been cupcakes.  What’s better than a mini-cake?!?!

This bake sale, was no different, I made three different kinds of cupcakes, here’s the recipe for the first one.  Lemon Cupcakes!

I got this recipe here at Your Homebased Mom, however there was some pertinent information missing.  Firstly, there’s no indication of how many cupcakes this makes – I like my cupcakes flat-topped, so, for me, this recipe made 3 dozen cupcakes.

I also made my own lemon curd a while back, and froze it, there’s no ‘quantity’ on the recipe, just ‘half of the above recipe’ which isn’t overly helpful.  I used 1/4 of a pint of my lemon curd, which was a little too much, but not detrimentally.

Lemon cupcakes (with lemon curd filling and lemon frosting)

3 cups flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup unsalted butter (room temperature)
2 cups sugar
4 eggs (separated)
1 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla (I added 1.5tsp)
1 tsp lemon extract (I added 1.5tsp)
zest of two lemons

Mix together flour, baking powder and salt.

Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add egg yolks, one at a time.  Mix well.  Alternately add in flour mixture and milk.  Beginning and ending with flour.  Add in vanilla and lemon and lemon zest.

In another bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry.  Add egg whites into batter, folding gently.

Place into cupcake liners.  Bake at 350 for about 20-25 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.  Cool.  Use half of lemon curd recipe to fill the cupcakes either with a squeeze bottle or by cutting a small hole in the middle of the cupcake and filling with lemon curd.

Lemon Curd

For this section, I ignored what was on the recipe and used my own curd from the freezer.  The recipe can be found here.

Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting

1 8 oz. pkg cream cheese, softened
1 cup sugar
1/8 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 C whipping cream
1/4 pint lemon curd

In a small bowl beat whipping cream until stiff.  In another bowl, mix together the cream cheese, sugar, salt and vanilla.  Add in lemon curd.  Beat until smooth.  Fold in whipped cream.

Personally I think the cake part of these cupcakes are too dense, the day-after they are baked, the tops are too sticky.  I just didn’t like the consistency.  But once you add the lemon curd and top it with the lemon frosting – they go down a treat.

Col took three dozen of my leftover cupcakes in to work and he said the lemon ones were the fastest to fly out the door!