Lemon Cupcakes with lemon chocolate transfer garnish

Recently my daughter Poppy had to make a large batch of cupcakes for a fundraising bake sale for school camp.

As our small lemon tree is often over burdened with lemons, she decided lemon cupcakes were an obvious choice. We made over 4 dozen standard size and 4 dozen minis. It took us all afternoon in a normal oven, but the lovely lemony smell was heavenly in the kitchen. 

We decided on a simple cream cheese icing. When there's nearly 100 cupcakes to embellish, the decoration had to be simple. We settled on yellow sparkling sugar and a chocolate transfer on a dark chocolate background (click here for a tutorial on how to create chocolate squares with chocolate transfers).

A few cupcakes were harmed in the tasting, however I can confirm they were delicious.

Lemon Cupcakes

225 grams butter

2 C Sugar

4 eggs

3 C Flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 C milk

2 Tbsp lemon zest

2 Tbsp lemon juice

Lemon cream cheese icing

250g cream cheese

125g butter

4 C icing sugar

zest lemon

squeeze lemon juice

Preheat oven to 160C

In the bowl of an electric mixer cream butter and sugar together until the mixture is light & fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time.

Alternately add your dry ingredients with your milk on low speed, a little at a time until well mixed.

Add the lemon juice and lemon zest. Mix an additional minute, your mixture should be light & fluffy.

Spoon or pipe mixture in to your cupcake cases (1/2 to 2/3 full). Bake for 15-20 minutes. A skewer inserted in the centre should come out clean.

To make icing, in an electric mixer cream together butter & cream cheese. Add icing sugar a little at a time, mixing well with each addition. Squeeze in your lemon juice to taste, mixing again to combine.

Our cupcakes have the cream cheese icing piped with a 1m Wilton piping nozzle. The chocolate transfer can be found here  and the sparkling sugar here