~Lemon Cupcakes~

Lemon cupcakes filled with lemon curd and topped with lemon zest cream cheese frosting....my kitchen smells like summer! I love love love lemons so I used the extra ones to make Cherry Lemonade too! This recipe is just my basic lemon cupcake recipe and I decided to buy some organic lemon curd I saw at the local grocery store. The cream cheese frosting is pretty basic too...then I decided to candy some of the lemon peel to top it off. Fresh pretty cupcakes.

If life gives you lemons...

candy them?

and make cupcakes!

I decided to use these simple cupcake liners
because one of my fave blogs "Cupcake Bake Shop"
posts cupcakes in them all the time. They're classic and
gorgeous!

Fresh Cherry Lemonade

~Chocolate and Cherry~

These are practice cupcakes for a request I have in 2 weeks...and I'm really feeling like an amateur at the moment. I feel passionately about quality ingredients in addition to putting time and effort into all my cupcakes so naturally I did that with these Cherry Chocolate cupcakes. I used dried cherries and "rejuvenated them" with 100% Cherry juice (thought about using a nice liquor....maybe next time). Coarsely chopped dark chocolate and lots of butter! The cupcake itself was very moist and the cherries were slightly bitter yet went very well with the chocolate. Although I followed all my recipe rules to a "t" they still fell in the center. But the result was so rich and delish that I can't complain. I used cherry juice and one whole vanilla bean to make a butter cream frosting. I love the pale pink color next to the dark chocolate cake. Pretty little cupcakes. I'm not 100% happy with them yet...so I'll keep working on them for now. I loved the red cupcake liners I bought but the color dyed my cupcake pan?! Oops! Well...at least they tasted good!50% cocoa chocolate chopped

folding in cherries and chocolate

cooling off

the results

just having a little girly fun with cupcakes & my fave tea cup