Chronicles of Baking: Happy Valentine's Day Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes!

This weekend my mom and I went to the Farmer's Market in Cerritos, CA. If you haven't been to a farmer's market you should go ASAP. My challenge this week was to find some lemons and strawberries to make Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes. So I bought some strawberries and lemons! I wasn't sure if I should make strawberry cake with lemon frosting or lemon cake with strawberry frosting but I had the ingredients I needed. We also went to Classic Cakes in Garden Grove and I bought some new cupcake supplies :)

Herringbone, Zebra, Hearts

Sprinkles, mini Herringbone, mini round pans:)

If I had unlimited funds, my apartment would be overrun by cupcake papers and sprinkles.... You can sorta see the small round cake pans I bought. One day you may even see me use them to make a mini ruffle layer cake. Also exciting.

Back to cupcake making...

I decided on lemon cake with strawberry cream cheese frosting and was debating whether or not to fill them with lemon curd.

J-E-L-L-O (secret ingredient)

Ready to bake

Those are some pretty lemons! Ready to be made into lemon curd

All done, papers were a little overfilled

Lemon Cake Batter :)

They smelled SOOOOOOOO good! I've never made lemon curd before but I found an easy looking recipe and had the lemons anyway (http://bakingbites.com/2008/04/low-fat-lemon-curd/). I did not take photos of the lemon curd because I was uncertain if it would make it into the final product.

Husband was waiting to taste test but said he wanted a complete one so he had to wait. So I dug the food processor out of the closet and pureed some of the yummy strawberries I bought. I strained them in hopes of taking out most of the seeds but alas it didn't work too well...

Then I made my go-to cream cheese frosting recipe and added the strawberry puree and mixed away. I really wanted to make two-tone roses again so I bought some red food coloring and hoped I would have light and dark pink. Well strawberry naturally makes things pink so I had a nice pale pink color cream cheese frosting.

Husband can now try the finished product. He was pretty happy. I put lemon curd in his as a test and topped it off with the frosting.

Success! He really liked them with the curd and thought it made it taste more like strawberry lemonade. So I put some in a pastry bag and filled the cupcakes with curd.

Then I added the red food coloring to my frosting and put both the light and dark pink in a pastry bag and started piping. Here they are....