July 10th, 2010
The Bridal Shower
After a disastrous attempt at lemon cupcakes that are not even blogworthy, I decided to scrap the recipe and start all over. I used a recipe for Extra Moist Lemon Cupcakes from recipezaar.com. The first thing to notice is that the recipe directions call for salt, but it isn't listed in the actual ingredient list! No problem, I used 1/2 tsp of salt and that seemed to work out fine. Second, one of the reviewers mentioned that they only had lemon yogurt so they used that instead of plain. This sounded plain genius to me considering that these are lemon cupcakes, so I did the same. I did not make the lemon syrup, instead I went with this recipe for Coconut Frosting from epicurious.com. I needed more frosting than this made, so I actually made it twice. The second batch had a completely different consistency than the first and I have no idea what could have made the difference. The only possibility that occurs to me is that the first batch I made the night before and refrigerated, while the second batch I used right away. The second batch was much creamier and pleasant looking than the first, which had a sort of oily consistency. I was nervous about the texture of adding all that coconut to the frosting, so with the first batch I strained it. The second time I didn't and there was no difference that I could tell. I also, didn't use the 2 and 1/2 cups sugar that the recipe calls for - I used four. It might be because of this that the icing didn't have much coconut flavor, but I had no choice because I needed the frosting to be nice and stiff. I can't tell if the coconut reduction is worth the trouble (I have a nice half inch burn on the side of my face from the constant explosions) I might use it but add coconut extract instead of vanilla, to get more flavor in it.
The wedding is (less than) two weeks away! I decided it was time to get fancy.
