Lemon curd cupcakes for baby Audrey Louise

These gorgeous little cupcakes have a moist buttercake base flavoured with coconut. They're then filled with fresh lemon curd and then topped with pretty patterned fondant and sugar flowers.

No, I'm not suggesting that you feed your baby lemon curd cupcakes (although, is that such a bad thing?). With my friend Lulu's baby due any minute now I've been planning to make some gorgeous little cupcakes to celebrate. The only issue being that I have no idea whether she is having a girl or a boy and I have no idea when little sweetpea will make her/his way into the world!

Luckily I had cupcake cases that covered both genders-blue and pink. Beaters at the ready I decide to make a gender neutral cupcake - lemon curd. Lulu is allergic to chocolate so it needed to be something that she could eat too as she's the one doing all of the hard work!

Lemon Curd Cupcakes

An Original Recipe by Lorraine Elliott

Preparation time: 30 minutes

Cooking time: 25 minutes

For the cupcake

• 125 g/4ozs butter at room temperature

• 2 teaspoons finely grated lemon rind

• 2/3 cup/130g/4.6ozs caster sugar

• 2 eggs at room temperature

• 1/3 cup/80ml/3ozs milk soured with a little lemon juice

• 3/4 cup/60g/2ozs desiccated coconut

• 1 cup/220g/7.7ozs self raising flour

• 1/4 cups cornflour

To decorate

• Lemon curd to fill (my best ever lemon curd recipe here)

• Fondant and sugar flowers to decorate

Step 1 - Preheat oven to 150c fan forced or 170c non fan forced.

Step 2 - Beat the first 4 ingredients (the butter, lemon rind, sugar and eggs) with an electric mixer until pale and fluffy

Step 3 - Add in the remaining cake ingredients. Spoon into patty tins.

Step 4 - Bake for 20-25 minutes. Cool in tin.

Step 5 - Cut a 2 cm deep hole in the centre of each cake, fill with curd, cut off pointy ends of the cut out tops leaving a flat disc and replace tops with these discs and smooth surface carefully.

Step 6 - Roll fondant in discs, cut round or fluted outline with cutter and stamp with desired patterns using embossing plates. Top with flower and secure flower with thickish mixture of icing sugar and water.

P.S. What great timing, on the day that I made these, I received a message from Lulu that Little Lady Audrey Louise was born at 2.45am! A very fitting name since mummy Lulu is very Audrey Hepburn-esque. Here are Audrey Louise's first cupcakes, ready to be taken to the hospital.