Chronicles of Baking: lemon

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Birthday Cakes!

So I've done quite a bit of baking and haven't really posted. By "quite a bit" I mean 2 batches since the last post :) One is a repeat and one is new!

Birthday Cakes:

Since I had already tried out my Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes on my co-workers and family I knew they were good to go so I made them for a trip to a bar to celebrate a birthday! This time I made two different colors of frosting for the flowers. Overall I was happy with them and L-O-V-E-D the way they tasted! I really like lemon soooooooo they were perfect. I highly recommend them. If you see the previous post you will see hubby did too. Here's some pictures

AHHHHH don't you love them?!!!

I don't think I posted pictures of the lemon curd being made last time so here it is. The recipe is soooo super easy.

Light Lemon Curd via Baking Bites
(from Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts)
1/3 cup strained, fresh lemon juice
2 tsp fresh lemon zest
5 tbsp sugar
1 large egg, room temperature
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Bring the Lemon Juice, Sugar, and Zest to a boil on the stove

Whisk the egg in a small bowl, slowly, SLOWLY add the hot lemon sugar mixture and whisk for two minutes.

Strain the mixture back into the pot on the stove and heat until it looks like it's thickening.

Put in small container and let cool.

Put in fridge

Get ready to pipe into cupcakes

Try not to eat it

This recipe is perfect for filling two dozen cupcakes!

Happy Birthday Nicole!

Available for your next birthday festivities

Sunday, February 13, 2011

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....