the tea party - post 1 - The lemon cupcake

My birthday is coming up, and to celebrate had a tea party at Sarah's house yesterday!

I was sick on Friday, so spent the day indoors, and the evening baking away :)

The menu (at least the part that i made) was:

Lemon cupcakes
Carrot cake
Scones
Mini Quiches

Sandwiches were lovingly made by becky, mc and alison :)  and deliciousness they were too!! :)

Ok so when looking for a lemon cupcake recipe, my demands were simple.  They must be LEMONY.  by lemony i mean lots of fresh lemon flavour bursting out of each cupcake.  2nd demand was nothing too complicated.  Apart from that, thanks to my mother's trusty Kenwood it was all good :)  Oh and they had to look like they would be soft and delicate :)

I tried to find one that was posted by a fellow blogger, something that had a little bit of description, someone who made food with lots of love - and i came across this blog: http://www.mybakingaddiction.com - which seems pretty awesome as far as baking ideas.

I used the recipe, and only very very slightly adapted it - I'm not a fan of the "extract" or "essence" thing when i can use the real thing, so I omitted the lemon extract and used the juice of one of the lemons i'd taken the zest off.  Also, I added a bit of zest to the frosting... like i said i love the lemony flavour!!!

You will find the full recipe here: http://www.mybakingaddiction.com/lemon-cupcakes/

Oh as an added note - I didn't put a huge amount of frosting on these cupcakes, as the weather was hot yesterday and the frosting was just too melty (even after just 10 minutes of being out of the fridge!) But luckily lemony cream cheese frosting is ideal for carrot cake, so used the leftover frosting to ice the cake :) 

Oh I must have had slightly smaller cupcake tins to the original blogger, as I got 36 cupcakes out of the batter :)

Hint: When buying lemons, try not to get the pretty giant yellow imported ones.  They are waxed to make em look extra tasty, however this is really, really shit when it comes to wanting to use the zest for cooking.  I bought the ones that looked under-ripe (as they all do in autumn in Malta), the green ones, but trust me, for flavour, and quality, they can't be beaten.  You might see flecks of greenish zest throughout the cakes and frostin, but the flavour was excellent :) 

Un-iced, straight out of the oven :) 

The timings etc were all wrong for me, but this is due to discovering (the hard way, thanks to a burnt lot of carrot muffins and cake) that ther'es something seriously wrong with our oven.  It's cooking unevenly, and much much hotter than it's supposed to.  Ended up cooking these cupcakes at 140 degrees, but it was really more like 180.  and had to turn the tray around for them to cook evenly.  but all in all, it worked out pretty well :D

ready to be served :D