lemon

(This week’s recipe came from Bake Space.)

More cupcakes up this week! I’ve been dying to make a pink lemonade cupcake for quite some time, so I decided it was finally time to do it. The recipe I found online seemed fairly simple and the pink color was extra cute. My co-workers seemed skeptical of a pink lemonade cupcake when I told them about it, so I knew I had to do it up right.

The recipe started with a batter that combined flour, sugar, vegetable oil, egg whites, buttermilk, red food coloring and thawed frozen pink lemonade concentrate (as well as a few other staples). The pink lemonade concentrate added a great lemony touch to the finished product, but lost a little of its tartness in the baking process:

The cupcakes baked up beautifully, although they weren’t as pink as I’d hoped. I added a few more drops of red food coloring to the remaining batter for the next round:

Second batch:

I felt like the frosting was the real star of this cupcake. The original recipe called for just a buttercream frosting, with powdered sugar, salt, vanilla and butter, but I felt like it was too bland. So I added a few tablespoons of the pink lemonade concentrate until it achieved a slightly tart flavor, and then a few drops of red food coloring to make it pink. Perfect:

The frosted cupcakes turned out quite cute:

My co-workers enjoyed them and became pink lemonade cupcake believers. These ones were gone within twenty minutes.

This week I also whipped up some Lemon Cupcakes for my husband’s cousin’s 40th birthday party. The cupcakes themselves turned out great, but my frosting was really weird. It never achieved the smoothness I was looking for, but stayed slightly curdled and spread on the cupcakes more like butter than frosting. It tasted great, but just looked a little weird:

Last week I baked Pineapple Upside Down Cupcakes, which I will be posting soon.