Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

Family dinner is every Friday, as I think I mentioned in the Baked Shrimp Scampi entry, and dear brother snorlax comes over. With Business School done and over with and me enjoying my summer days I now have a bit of time to do some baking. So for family dinner I made Ina Garten's Lobster Pot Pie (recipe next entry) and for dessert I thought something citrus would be refreshing.

While browsing the internet I stumbled upon another website with just recipes upon recipes for cupcakes, one recipe in particular caught my eye. Lemon Meringue Cupcakes. So fresh, lemony and adorable to boot! If there is one thing that dear brother snorlax loves it's lemon.

Ingredients:

Cupcakes:

• 1 1/2 cups of cake flour Note: If you do not have cake flour you can mix 1 3/4 cups of AP flour and 1/4 cup of cornstarch to make 2 cups of a AP flour substitute then just use 1 1/2 cups.
• 1 1/2 tsp of baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 stick of butter (room temperature)
• 1 cup of sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 cup of milk

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Mix Flour, baking powder and salt.
3. Gradually beat in butter (if it is room temp this will be so much easier), one the butter is well mixed (little clumps will start forming) throughly beat in the sugar.
4. Beat in Eggs, vanilla and milk and fill into baking cups about 2/3 of the way.
5. Bake for 20 min. You'll know the cupcakes are done when a tooth pick comes out clean.

Filling:

• 1 egg + 1 yolk
• Juice of 1 fresh lemon
• 1/2 stick of butter
• 1/2 cup of sugar

I would recommend setting out everything before beginning this process as you want to be beating the mixture constantly so you don't end up with scrambled eggs.

1. Using a double boiler (that is a bowl set over simmering water) beat the egg and yolk, I used a hand held electric beater.
2. Beat in the lemon, butter and sugar.
3. Stir over medium heat until the mixture has a pudding like consistency.

It will look weird at first especially as the butter breaks down but eventually you will end up with something that looks like a lemon pudding. To me this was like making caramel all over again, because you look at the mixture and you tell your self "there is no way that it is going to get thick" and then 5 minutes later it is thick and you wonder how you could have doubted yourself.

Frosting (Meringue)

• 5 tbsp of water
• 1/4 tsp cream of tartar
• 1 1/3 of cup of sugar
• 2 egg whites
• 1tbsp of light corn syrup
• 1 tsp of vanilla

1. Beat water, cream of tartar, sugar, egg whites, and syrup in a double boiler on low.
2. When the mixture reaches 140 degrees beat on high for 5 minutes.
3. Remove from heat , add vanilla and beat for another 3 minutes.

Assembly:

To put the filling in the cupcakes I used a small cookie cutter to hollow out the top of each cupcake:

Spoon a little bit of the lemon filling into each cupcake:

Pop the top back on and cover with meringue!

Summertimes

Oh I have been terrible with keeping up with my blog. This is not to say that I haven't been baking up a storm though. In fact, due to certain factors I didn't seek out summer employment so I find myself baking anything that pops into my head. It's really quite amazing because this is the first summer since I was 15 that I'm not working and the first summer since before I can remember that I'm not at least in some type of summer school.

In an attempt to get out of the house and get in some practice before culinary school my mother suggested I take a cake decorating class. Simple enough, I went to Michael's to check it out and Tuesday I had my first class.

While the first 30-40 minutes of the two hour class seemed like a pitch to see all of the wonderful Wilton products we could buy the rest of the class was pretty fun. I have to admit that I'm tickled pink over the idea that I will be given a certificate at the end of the class, I'm contemplating signing up for the next class which will deal with gum paste flowers.

Since it was the first class we didn't take on anything very difficult, we practiced stars and pressure control when dealing with frosting bags. May I just say that disposable frosting bags are the best thing in the world. I admit cleaning up is probably the one thing about baking that I don't dig so if I can just take off the coupler and tip and throw the bag out I'm a pretty camper. There's just something about getting the left over frosting wet that makes me squeamish.

I digress, I basically ended up just decorating cookies with plain white frosting:

Next week we are actually working with cakes and before hand I'll be needing to bake and crumb coat my own cake. I'm thinking a vanilla cake with Root beer buttercream filling. Yum.