Delightful Little Lemon Cupcakes

This has been a favorite recipe of mine for many years. The sour cream gives the cupcakes a great texture and fits in well with the tang of the lemon flavoring. I especially love the combination of lemon and raspberry, and you’ll see my suggestion for a lemon buttercream and raspberry jam topping. They shout spring!

LEMON CREAM CUPCAKES

Makes 48 small cupcakes. These are very moist and delicious but not terribly lemony. Very good with a topping of a layer of raspberry jam and lemon buttercream.  The original recipe is from Taste of Home, but had a yield of only 30. By dividing up the batter to make 48 I've made the recipe yield smaller cupcakes that have room for the jam and a nice layer of buttercream.

Servings 48 cupcakes, wih just 8 grams of sugar per cupcake, but that does not include buttercream and jam.
Debi Simons Debi Simons

Ingredients

  • 1 cup butter, softened
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 1/8 tsp lemon oil or 1 tsp. grated zest*
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2 cups sour cream

Instructions

  1. In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Add lemon oil or zest and vanilla; mix well. Combine dry ingredients; add to creamed mixture alternately with sour cream (batter will be thick). Fill foil-lined muffin cups enough batter to fill about 1/3 of the muffin tin. (Yes, only 1/3. You want these to be small. And foil cupcake liners work much better than paper ones, as they are easier to peel off. A quick spritz of baking spray makes them even easier.) Bake at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes; remove to wire racks and cool completely.

Recipe Notes

*I keep lemon oil on hand and always use it in place of zest. It is pressed from lemon peel, so it is the substance that gives lemon zest its flavor and is extremely strong. Be very careful not to overdo this ingredient, as you can ruin a whole batch that way. If you taste the batter and feel that it's not lemony enough, add additional oil literally drop by drop. Citrus oils last forever in the fridge. 

Chocolate-and-Beer Cupcakes–They Really Are Good!

Tree of chocolate stout cupcakesThis recipe is so delicious that it’s worth going to the effort of getting an unusual ingredient.  (The photo is pretty bad, I know.I should be making these again in the foreseeable future and will re-take it.)

Children will not like them, as they’re very strongly flavored.  The alcohol in the beer bakes out, of course, but you can definitely taste it in the finished product.  And I use bittersweet chocolate for the glaze, but you can use semisweet if you want a kinder, gentler version.  I got this recipe from the King Arthur Flour catalog several years ago and ended up making it for a reception after a Celtic-themed concert. The Irish like their beer, don’t they?  Make sure that you include a menu card telling people what these are.  They are seriously, seriously chocolatey and seriously, seriously rich.  I have made them much smaller than the original recipe.

Read moreChocolate-and-Beer Cupcakes–They Really Are Good!

Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcake Extravaganza

Strawberry muffins on cupcake standMy dear friend Cindy took a picture of the final product under less-than-optimum circumstances in the low light of the wedding reception.  Thank you, Cindy!  As usual I wasn’t prepared to take pictures and had left my camera in the car.

I made these for the daughter of a dear friend, and I have to say that they were very successful.  Every single one of the 96 I made disappeared, and I got lots of compliments. Can’t recommend them highly enough. They’re not very hard and can be made in advance and frozen excluding the strawberries and glaze. The actual filling is a very basic plain cheesecake mixture; the toppings make them special. You can do even more with decorating them if you want to.

 

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Easy, Rich Chocolate Cupcakes

rich chocolate cupcakes

Pretty nice-looking cupcake, isn’t it?  Beautifully domed, perfectly sized for the muffin tin cup.  And the inside was moist and delicious, in spite of the fact that I overbaked it a bit.  (Note to self:  Be sure to use the oven timer that measures minutes and seconds, not hours and minutes, when baking something that requires minutes.  If I hadn’t realized at about the 20-minute mark that I’d set the wrong timer, the above would be a picture of a lump of chocolate coal.  As it was, they probably baked about five minutes more than necessary.)  I did frost these with an unbelievably delicious chocolate buttercream, but I’ll be discussing that recipe in a later post.

Below are are two comparison shots of the cupcakes this week and the ones last week.

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Lava You Don’t Get from a Volcano

chocolate lava cake a la modeHere’s a shot of one of the chocolate lava cakes I made for my brother-in-law’s birthday party.  I think the last time I made these was for the same occasion, two years ago.  Gideon had said periodically since then that I should make them again, and my answer has always been, “I’ll make them for Ed’s birthday.”  So here they are.  I made some changes from the recipe I found online, and this is now a pretty standard recipe anyway. I did find it interesting that, as for a number of recipes, the innovation came about because of a mistake. Its originator, chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, apparently pulled a chocolate cake out of the oven too soon and realized that its underbaked warm center was actually an asset. Then he must have developed the individual cakes that are usual today. A full-sized version would be very messy to serve.

You’ll notice in the recipe below that I’ve given another idea for serving these, which is to just leave them in the individual ramekins and let people eat them that way. You thus avoid the dreaded non-molding cakes and the fiddling with hot little dishes.

Read moreLava You Don’t Get from a Volcano