Lemony Buttercream Cupcakes

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!

Healthy-ish Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

A week or so ago my sister Hilda posted a recipe for Healthy Oatmeal Cookies on her blog, Handmade Therapy. You can see the original post with the recipe here.

My sister did a few things differently from the recipe that she had, and I did as well. This is what I did differently from the original recipe:

• I used a little less than a cup of spelt flour and 1/4 cup of soy flour instead of the whole wheat flour
• I added about 1/3 cup of flaxseed meal
• I didn't have molasses, so I used a tbsp of parked dark brown sugar mixed with a bit of water instead
• I used 1/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil and 1/4 cup of applesauce for the oil measurement
• I added the 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts and about 3/4 cup of chocolate chips

Waiting for the mix to cool in the fridge was the hardest part... I wanted warm chocolate chip cookies! But I figured it was worth the wait since it would improve the final flavour of the cookies (according to my sister in her post).

They definitely looked pretty and appetizing when they came out of the oven, and they were tasty, but I would do a couple of things differently next time:

• I didn't find the cookies sweet enough, so I would add more brown sugar. I suppose that would detract from the "healthiness" of the cookies, but they would taste better and I care more about taste than health in my baked goods.
• I would add the extra egg white that's suggested in the original recipe to help the cookies stay together a bit better. They weren't crumbly, but the dough could benefit from better binding.
• I'd probably add a bit more applesauce or perhaps a bit of milk to increase the moistness of the finished cookies.

Overall, I like these, and I actually think these are the type of cookies that will taste better cooled down (as I'm writing this, they are still warm from the oven so I haven't tasted them cold yet). I also think there is some good nutrition in these cookies and it helps me feel a bit less guilty about eating so many of them, since my husband isn't a big baked goods fan (tragic, I know).