I served these along with the chocolate peanut butter cupcakes we talked about yesterday and some vanilla cupcakes with salted caramel frosting that we'll talk about on Monday and no one wanted to eat the lemon cupcakes. It's too bad because these are pretty darn good. I don't know why but the lemons were the last to go. (Fine, I admit it, if I had to pick, I wouldn't have pick these either but only because very little can compete with salted caramel. Everything is relative.)These guys consist of a fluffy lemon cake, a berry filling and lemon buttercream frosting.
The cake itself is a pretty traditional white cake recipe using egg whites that are whipped and folded into the batter. The batter gets a hefty dose of lemon flavor from the zest of two lemons. I could have gone for more lemon flavor myself, but since these also get topped with lemon frosting some restraint may not be a bad idea.
I had the most difficulty with the berry filling which is a combination of berries, butter, egg yolks and sugar that is cooked up to thicken it and mixed with lemon juice. Issue #1: The recipe calls for raspberry filling and I was all set with my raspberries until I realized that one of those little containers of raspberries is NOT a pint. It's a half a pint. I sighed and thought about what to do. I almost just made a half a batch of the filling until I remembered that I had blueberries and added some of those to the mix.
Issue #2: I had to cook it freaking forever to get it to thicken up. It was weird because it should have thickened up pretty fast due to all the egg yolks in it.
Issue #3: The butter. My goodness the butter was so odd. First of all the butter was put into the curd at the beginning of the cooking process which is different than other curds I've made where everything else is cooked and then the butter is whisked in at the end. When I was straining mixture the butter separated and totally grossed me out. Can you see it over there? It's nasty. I couldn't stand looking at it so I drained it off. However, once I whisked in the lemon juice, it all came together and held up just fine.
In the end, I really wish I'd just used raspberry jam. I think it would have had the same effect and saved me a bunch of time and trouble.
Luckily, I didn't have any issues with the lemon buttercream frosting. It was pretty straight forward... butter, lemon zest, powdered sugar, cream and lemon juice.
No drama.
Thank goodness.
The frosting is a very traditional American buttercream and has a great, tart lemon flavor.
Putting these guys together was fun because I got to use my cupcake corer. I love using my random baking tools, it helps me justify buying all this stuff when I can tell CA I've used it more than once.
If you like lemon, these cupcakes are pretty delicious. I liked them a lot. CA didn't try them because he was too busy eating the Chocolate Cupcakes with Ganache and Peanut Butter Frosting... just like everybody else.
I got this recipe from Smells Like Home and followed the instructions exactly (except for the blueberry/raspberry business) so hop on over there if you want to make these too.
Enjoy!
Julie
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