To the delight of my coworkers, I have started testing cupcake recipes and bringing the results to work. So far, I've only brought in Red velvet (at the bride's request, I'll use blue food dye instead of red for the wedding) and this past weekend I made lemon cupcakes. I used a recipe found at Geek-kitten's livejournal blog, and though I received many complements, I'm not 100% satisfied with the outcome. The flavor of the cake is very good, but the texture is a little too crumbly for my taste. My friends insist I'm too picky and that they really like them, but these are for a wedding and I want to find the best recipe out there.

Kate, the bride, has been an enthusiastic accomplice in my cupcake endeavors. She has even ordered edible pearl luster spray that I'll wield like a Tanning Salon Maverick and give those girls (read: cupcakes) a beautiful summer glow! She also ordered bronze spray for the Devil's food cupcakes and blue for the blue velvet cupcakes. I can't wait for these weird bottles of sprayable candy to arrive.

So, back to the cupcakes. When looking for a lemon cupcake recipe, I really didn't have much in the way of criteria beyond (1) I wanted the ingredients to be easy to find and (2) the recipe should be pretty straight forward. I've looked through plenty of recipes online, and many of them call for intricate maneuvers that would be feasible if I weren't trying to make several dozen cupcakes.

Following Geek-kitten's recipe was easy, but I would recommend filling the baking cups only 3/4 full instead of nearly to the top as she has suggested. Filling the cups too full resulted in a muffin shaped cupcake (see pic below) for the first batch. For the second batch, I filled them 3/4 full and the results were a recognizable cupcake shape.

While the cupcakes were cooling, I made the frosting. The original recipe for this frosting is here, but I tweaked the recipe. Here's the ingredients and amounts I used.

2 sticks, unsalted butter (softened to room temp for about 30 minutes)

1/3 cup of Crisco (weird, right?)

2 cups of powdered/confectioner's sugar (you might want to add more depending on how sweet your tooth is)

1 tsp of vanilla extract

1 tbsp of fresh squeezed lemon juice

Mix it all together with an electric mixer, slop it into a frosting bag, squeeze, and voila!

As adorable as these are, it was obvious that I needed to up the cute factor so I added jelly beans and small slices of lemon to the frosting.

Cute, right? I'll be making a second batch of lemon cupcakes later this week with a different recipe and with the lustre spray. I'll post the results here, of course. TTFN!