When life hands you lemons....

 If someone were to just peruse my blog for even one minute, one thing that would be fairly obvious is my stance on chocolate.... I love chocolate.  Therefore, the bulk of my recipes revolve around chocolate.  However, in order to expand my baking abilities and possibly gain some followers who *gasp* don't like chocolate, I decided to branch out a bit and try making a fruit dessert.  In the spirit of mother's day, I decided to make some lemon cupcakes for my wonderful mother who may be one of those people who isn't as obsessed with chocolate as I am.  I have to admit, I was a bit nervous.  I rarely make fruit-based desserts, let alone make fruit-based in Gertrude, so I was really hoping that the stars would align to allow me to perfect a slightly ambitious recipe of lemon-curd- filled lemon cupcakes with lemon buttercream.... wow, that is a lot of lemon!!

Usually when I bake super ambitious desserts, I use my parents' kitchen due to the presence of a reliable oven and more importantly, a kitchen-aid.  I have already decided that the first kitchen item I will buy when I am no longer a starving student (well, not exactly starving) is a kitchen-aid.  Those things are amazing for ambitious, yet slightly lazy bakers like myself.  Anyways, because I was going to surprise my mom, I decided I should just do this whole production in my little kitchen with Gertrude and my $20 hand mixer that doesn't even have all the right metal attachments.

I used this recipe:

http://oishiitreats.blogspot.com/2013/04/so-me-your-pucker-face-lemon-curd_16.html

I didn't feel like having three windows open and this recipe covered everything (cupcakes, lemon curd filling and frosting.)

step 1: cake.  Mixing it up was simple enough.  I highly recommend that anytime a recipe calls for cake flour, use it! It makes a world of a difference in cakes/cupcakes... it is called CAKE flour after all.  Likewise, I have mentioned this before, but always use unsalted butter in recipes.  The amount of salt in different butters is variable, so don't just take the salt out of the recipe and use salted butter.  Anyways, Gertrude was on pretty good behavior.  The edges were slightly brown, but not too bad.  I figured the slightly browned edges were just an excuse to put more frosting the cupcakes.

step 2: Lemon curd.  This was the step that would make or break me.  You can look at the posted recipe for more specifics, but in short, the idea with lemon curd is to heat up butter, eggs, lemon juice and sugar.  I have a bit of lets call it eggsxiety... meaning I get a bit anxious when heating up eggs in any custard/curd-like product since I always seem to get the eggs too hot..... which means they scramble.... which means I usually have to filter out scrambled eggs out of my product.... not cool. The recipe was very specific about not letting the mixture boil, so I literally sat there for about 10 minutes stirring this mixture as fast as I possibly good to prevent any boiling.  When it started to boil even with my stirring, I decided to take it off the heat, even though it wasn't exactly that thick yet.  Regardless, I followed the instructions and put it in the fridge.  Usually, I would be very impatient and try to prematurely fill the cupcakes, but I decided to be a mature adult and let the lemon curd sit in the fridge for a while.  When I came back, the slightly grossish looking curd had turned into a magical bowl of lemony goodness... patience is a virtue.   I proceeded to use a teaspoon to make little holes in the tops of my cupcakes and fill them up.

step 3: frosting.  This is the part I was least worried about, yet it caused me the most problems.  I followed the recipe exactly, but after two batches of cupcakes in gertrude on a 90 degrees day, my kitchen was slightly on the warmer side.  Therefore, my frosting was not quite the consistency I was hoping for... a little soupy.  I still decided to load up my dessert decorator pro (aka the best 10 dollars I have even spent in my life) with this liquidy frosting.  The frosting sort of lost its form after I put in on each cupcake... not exactly what I was going for... But no one has to know that! They ended up looking decent after they firmed up in the fridge for a bit.

Most importantly, the cupcakes were absolutely delicious.  Fruity dessert win.  My mom loved them, which was obviously my ultimate goal.  Anyways, here were the final products!! So in conclusion... when life hands you lemons, make lemon cupcakes!