We had a guest over for dinner tonight which inspired me to make dessert. I was going to make these divine chocolate cupcakes that I made for Valentine's Day (I will blog about them another day, I promise) but I decided I wanted something that tasted like spring (I'm dreaming of warmth). So I did a search for lemon cupcakes with buttercream icing (the best kind of icing out there) and I found a recipe on a blog called The Cupcakery. And they are YUMMY!! You can see the original recipe with lots of pretty pictures here.
I pretty much followed the recipe exactly, except that I used cake and pastry flour rather than all-purpose flour. I think it works better, plus I had some in my cupboard. I also didn't have enough unsalted butter, so I just used salted butter and decreased the salt in the recipe by about half. I also used a stand mixer (my mom's old Braun which after 20+ years still works like a charm - in fact, she says she misses it even though she has a nice new KitchenAid mixer) rather than an electric mixer and it worked great. Plus it's much less labour intensive, so that's a bonus. I didn't have mini baking cups so I just made regular-sized cupcakes; this recipe makes 24 of them. I also didn't add any food colouring to the icing since I didn't have any and I think they look appetizing without the colour. As you can tell by the picture, I'm not the best at icing cupcakes; I don't have any fancy icing tools, so I just used a plastic Ziploc bag with a corner cut off to pipe the icing onto the cupcakes. And it worked fine. The amount of icing for each cupcake was perfect for my taste, but the recipe as is only iced 16 of the 24 cupcakes. So if you love lots of icing on your cupcakes, make about 1.5 times the amount in this recipe. Or double it if you really love icing. :)
A couple practical points to help you out should you choose to make this recipe: a stick of butter is equal to half a cup and you'll need 2-3 lemons, depending on their size. You can get about 1 tbsp of zest and 2 tbsp of juice from each lemon. If the juice is particularly seedy or full of rind, I found that straining with a bit of cheese cloth worked like a charm to ensure you have a nice clear juice, which is especially important for the icing. A bit of rind in the batter will only improve the lemony flavour.
If you're on the fence about making these, just do it, especially if you love lemony sweets. They're delicious!
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