Happy Lemon Cupcakes

This morning was full of surprises. First surprise was the time. I woke up so late this morning and that was not a great thing. Second surprise was in my email. I discovered that I had missed my chiropractor's appointment yesterday morning! I have been so good about not missing or being late to my chiropractor, so this sucked. I decided to make him some “My Bad, Don’t be Mad” cupcakes. I decided to make lemon cupcakes because of two things.

One, lemons are one of those things that’s made to make people happy. I mean the happy face icon is just two dots and a curved line on a perfectly round and yellow lemon. So it was more than fitting to make happy cupcakes for this man, he’s fixing my back and he has a lot of power when he has my neck in his hands.

Two, I also made these cupcakes for Mother’s Day and wanted to post up a blog of these cupcakes. So, I decided to take down two (paper) birds with one (plastic) bullet.

Ingredients:
¾ cups flour
1 ½ tablespoons of cornstarch
⅔ tsp baking powder
⅓ cups sugar
¼ cup butter
1 egg
¼ tsp vanilla extract
2 ½ teaspoon lemon zest *
2 tablespoon lemon juice*
¼ cup milk

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line cupcake tins with liners
2. Zest and juice lemons
3. Mix flour, corn starch, and baking powder
4. Cream butter and sugar
5. Add eggs, one at a time to creamed butter, adding vanilla with the last egg, beating until fully incorporated
6. Add lemon zest to butter, sugar, and egg mix
7. Add lemon juice to milk
8. Add ¼ of flour mix to butter, sugar, and egg mix; add ⅓ of milk. Continue alternating flour mix and milk until both are all added.
9. Carefully spoon batter into cupcake liners. I use a two spoon method because I didn’t want to spend money on a scoop, but I heard those are really helpful.
10. Bake for 17 minutes. I made mini cupcakes and baked mine for only 12 minutes. Make sure to test that your cupcakes are fully baked. Either stick a toothpick into the cupcake, if it comes out clean it's good to eat or light tap the top of your cupcake, if it bounces back it's ready.

To make the whipped topping:
½ cup heavy whipping cream
remaining lemon zest
2 teaspoons of lemon juice

1. Beat the heavy whipping cream until soft peaks form.
2. Add the lemon zest and lemon juice. and beat until incorporated.

To frost the cupcakes, I put the cream into a zippered snack bag, sealed it off, snipped off a corner, and piped the cream onto the cupcakes.

Enjoy!

Price breakdown:

Flour, sugar, baking power--free
Cornstarch--$1.09
Cupcake liners--$0.79 for 100 mini liners
Lemons--free (Thanks Jimmy!)
Milk--$2.29
Heavy whipping cream--$3.29 for a quart size

Total: $7.46

I made 24 mini cupcakes and still had A LOT of the ingredients left over to make many more.

* I zested 2 lemons and juiced 1 lemon. I measure out the zest for the batter (1/2 tablespoon) and then used the rest of it in the frosting. I measure the juice for both the batter and the frosting and used the leftover juice for a pepper sauce.