These lemon cupcakes are a dream! Soft pillowy cupcakes are flavoured with fresh lemon, white chocolate, basil and poppy seeds. Then they're topped with a silky cream cheese browned butter frosting, dabs of lemon curd and a basil leaf!
These lemon cupcakes are pretty enough to give as gifts. I gave these cupcakes as a gift to a few people and they loved the look and taste of them.
Lemon cake tips: I use the soda water to add more rise to the cupcakes so that they're lighter. This combined with the baking powder makes these lemon cakes fluffy and light.
Swirl Piping Tip: The swirly pattern in the icing is made using a #125 tip. it's one of my favourite tips and you can use it to make buttercream flowers too.
Lemons: my favourite lemons are ones from my friend's trees because they are juicier than store bought lemons that have a thick skin and very little juice and seeds. The seeds are very useful for jam making. I never add pectin to my jams and instead using lemon seeds to thicken jams. See recipes for Apricot Jam, Vanilla Cherry Jam and Mulberry Gin & Tonic Jam.
Other lemon recipes: I LOVE lemons and they are in season now in winter so they're plentiful. Try these No Bake Lemonade Coconut Bars, Lemon Delicious Cheesecake, Lemon Cream Cheese Pullapart Bread, Simple Lemon Tart, Lemon Blackberry Cake , Bitter Lemon Poppyseed Loaf Cake, Passionfruit & Lemon Mini Cakes, Lemon Mascarpone Cream Cloud Cake, Rosemary, Lemon & Golden Syrup Scones, Vegan Lemon Coconut Cake, Mint Lemon Slushie {Limonana}, Preserved Lemon, Ginger & Rosemary Loaf Cake, The BEST Lemon Curd, Fish Pie With Crispy Lemon Mashed Potato Topping, Lemon Chiffon Cake, Feta & Lemon Topped Bruschetta and my show stopping Lemonade Cake!
Browned butter: is another favourite ingredient in the kitchen. Everyone has probably tried browned butter with gnocchi or in some type of pasta but did you know that it makes your baked goods so delicious? I always have a block of browned butter in my fridge and you don't need to replace the entire butter quantity with it. If you replace even a quarter of the total butter weight with browned butter it will lend the most gorgeous aroma to your baked goods. It's what makes my Anzac biscuits so moreish and different. Here is a detailed recipe for how to make brown butter.
These lemon cupcakes are a great afternoon tea snack and I gave them to Mr NQN every afternoon. He is still working from home and likely to be doing so for the next few months. His work was one of the first to have people work from home, long before it was mandatory or widespread.
I've mentioned before how we have both switched places and he is in my office which is the second bedroom and I have moved to the dining room which is easier for both of us since he seems to spend 6 hours a day on zoom calls.
Anyway do you remember that professor in Korea who had his toddler Marion burst into an interview he was doing with the BBC? Mr NQN calls me Marion because apparently that's the way I walk into a room (he sometimes calls me Kramer). I guess I tend to burst into rooms. But this time I could hear him on a call but I needed the vacuum cleaner because I have a clean floor obsession.
I opened the door and whispered, "Vacuum cleaner". Mr NQN has headphones so he didn't even notice but then the vacuum cleaner was caught up in the network cable which was caught up in a piece of luggage and it started dragging everything along with it.
When he saw everything moving in his computer screen he jumped up and looked around to find his wife crouching on the ground out of the view of the camera and gingerly trying to extricate herself out of the situation subtly-it was as though I was exiting in the opposite way I enter. He just shook his head and muttered, "Marion...".
So tell me Dear Reader, how do you enter a room? Do you do it subtly or do you tend to burst in? Do you like lemons? How many lemons do you go through in a week?
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