Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes

Cupcakes. I made some. I like making cupcakes, any excuse will do. These are Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes.

You know you want to try it.

The cupcake is lemon. To make it use a standard yellow cake recipe, any one will do, with 1/8 tsp of lemon oil and two tsp of lemon zest. Lemon oil is strong so you just need a tiny, little bit.  You can get some here at King Arthur Flour. The one ounce will last you a loooooong time.

The strawberry frosting is here at Glorious Treats. I love this recipe! Now that I'm an adult I am finding that most non-chocolate frosting is too sweet. Sweet cupcakes combined with sweeter frosting... ick, it's just too much. Then I found the recipe above. She uses cream cheese but it doesn't taste too cream cheesy (not that cream-cheesy flavor is a bad thing) it's simply less sweet. I also love how she uses strawberry preserves, not extract, to give it the strawberry flavor. (I HATE strawberry extract. It smells like a strawberry-scented eraser. I like strawberry-scented erasers but I have no desire to eat one.) It's some good frosting, let me tell you! I highly recommend it!

Please don't eat!

OK, I mentioned it so I had to do it. Here are some cute (kawaii), Japanese, strawberry-scented erasers available here at Cool Pencil Case.com. I may have to get some for Lu's back to school stuff.


Anyway, back to cupcakes. I have also found that piping the frosting onto the cupcakes is much easier and looks much nicer than spreading it on with a knife. As a general rule, the fact that it just looks nicer wouldn't be enough to make me switch for everyday cupcakes. It is actually easier. I stuck a lemon slice candy on the top just to make it cute. I ran out of summer-y cupcake papers, no one cared, leading me to believe that I use cute cupcake papers mostly for my own benefit.

I'll be doing more baking posts as time goes by. I'll even have some tips for you. I'm a pretty good cake-baker so I'll be sharing what I know.

See you tomorrow cupcake!