Day 2 of this little adventure, and I’m in love with lemon. Something I love during the summer is anything lemony. So I decided to go with a simple vanilla cupcake with lemon frosting.

The recipe worked out really well in terms of flavour. However, Bombay is currently 35C and I don’t have an airconditioner in my kitchen which means the icing fell a little flat, and melted everywhere. So I apologize if the cupcakes don’t look as pretty.

For the cupcakes:

• 11og butter
• 200g castor sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 150g flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 eggs
• 80ml milk

For the icing:

• 375g icing sugar
• 230g unsalted butter
• 1 tbsp lemon zest
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 3 tbsp cream

 

I suggest starting off with making the cupcakes and then moving onto the icing.

For the cupcakes, beat the sugar, butter and vanilla extract till light and fluffy. In college we have always learned to cream the butter using our hands, thankfully here I got to use an electric beater.

Add in the eggs one at a time and whisk well. Be careful, the butter might split.

In a seperate bowl add the flour and baking powder. Whisk well ensuring that all lumps are broken.

Now alaternating the wet and dry ingredients, add the flour first and then milk, starting and ending with flour. The sequence would be flour-milk-flour-milk-flour. Whisk the batter well, but be careful since the batter may split. Infact mine did so I added a little more flour. Usually that helps but in this case, it didn’t. Thankfully, the fact that the batter had split didn’t affect the texture of my cake.

Next I lined my muffin mold with liners, and scooped the batter into the tray getting it ready for the oven.

The oven must be prepped at 180C and the cupcakes go in for 12-18 minutes, till a toothpick comes out clean.

Once the cupcakes are in the oven, I moved onto the lemon frosting. Simply whisk the butter and cream together for a few minutes till it emulsifies and then add the sugar cup by cup folding every few minutes so that all the sugar combines.

I started with 2 cups of sugar and then added a 3rd since I found the frosting leaving a buttery texture on my tongue.

I added the lemon juice and zest right at the end since I had a feeling the butter would split. Which it did, but it wasn’t too bad.

I also added a couple of drops of yellow food colouring to get a lemon yellow and stick to the theme as much as possible.

Keep checking on the cupcakes and once done, leave them to cool for a few minutes in the tray and then on the wire rack for at least an hour.

Its finally the time to pipe the icing. I used a simple star nozzle to get a pretty pattern which lasted for all of 5 seconds before it melted into a little puddle on the cupcake. But it happens.