Baking With Grace: August Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes

As you know, Grace 2015 GOTY just loves to bake and I do too! So I thought that each month Grace and I would do some baking and feature a different cupcake flavor or theme. This month's cupcake will be Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes. They just seem to be the perfect kind of cupcake for summer. What could be better in the hot month of August than strawberry lemonade?

Grace just loves to bake in her kitchen.

I also had another great helper in my kitchen, it was my daughter Emily. She also loves to bake. She read the recipe for me while I gathered the ingredients. I found the recipe for Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes on Food.com.

These are the ingredients for the cupcakes.

First of all, I had to line my muffin tin with cupcake liners. I found some pretty liners at Walmart in the Wilton baking section. I also found a neat little gadget that takes the guess work out of filling cupcakes or muffins. You just fill the little cup (included in the package) up to the top and scrape out your cake batter into the cake liners. Easy peasy and you get a perfect amount in there without your cupcake erupting over the top of your liner. 

I love this gadget by Wilton!

Then we measured our dry ingredients and set them aside. After that, we whisked together sugar, the melted butter, and egg until smooth. (Oh and you might want to let your melted butter cool just a bit and add it slowly into the egg or you may end up with scrambled eggs!) Then add your yogurt, lemon zest, lemon juice, and lemon extract. And by the way, does anyone not know what lemon zest is? Unless you bake a lot, you may not know. The zest of the lemon is the yellow skin of the lemon. You want to use a fine grater or a lemon zester. You just want to grate the yellow part and not down to the white part of the lemon because the white part is really bitter. But you need 2 teaspoons of lemon zest and one lemon should give you that.

Here I have grated the lemon to get the zest.

After you add that, you will beat it with a whisk attachment of your mixer until it is smooth. Now you can add your flour and mix until smooth. You don't want to over mix it. Now here is where that handy little gadget from Wilton comes in that I told you about. Scoop the batter into that and scrape it out with the little spatula into the cupcake liners. Now bake the cupcakes in a 350 oven for 22-25 minutes. 

While the cupcakes are baking, you can clean up your mess first! Because you know that there will be messes. I have a feeling that Grace made some messes when she was making her cupcakes. Pssst....... I'll tell you about it later. Then after the dishes are washed, you can gather your ingredients for the frosting. 

The ingredients for the frosting.

Now I've got to tell you that my daughter Emily is so smart! As I was reading the list of ingredients, I noticed that it said to use 6 oz. of butter at room temp. Well sometimes I really have to think about measurements and equivalents really hard. It doesn't always come so easy with me. So as I was looking it up on my Ipad, she was already figuring it out in her head. She came up with the answer quicker that the internet or I could! 6 oz. of butter equals to a stick and a half or 12 tablespoons. Smart! 

Well anyway, I washed the strawberries and put them in my Magic Bullet because I don't have a food processor. I'm telling you I just love my Magic Bullet! You can do a whole lot more with them than just make smoothies. Although they are very good for those too!

I used my Magic Bullet to puree the strawberries.

And it worked great!

Now just set those strawberries aside while you mix the egg whites and sugar. You want to heat a pan of water on the stove and get it to simmer. You want to make kind of a double boiler. Put your mixing bowl on the pan of simmering water and whisk the egg whites and sugar for about 3 minutes or until it's hot. Then put it back onto your upright mixer. Whisk this until it's cool about 6-10 minutes. Beat in the butter one tablespoon at a time until it is smooth. Now gradually beat in the lemon juice, then the vanilla.

It should look something like this.

Now at this point, you could leave it like this and you would just have lemon frosting but if you want to, add the strawberries now. Then frost the cupcakes.

Here are my cupcakes. They are probably not as pretty as the ones on Food.com

Now ok, I'm going give a review of this recipe. I thought that they tasted alright. They weren't bad. They kind of tasted like lemon pie. The cake part was kind of dense though. The texture was more like a muffin rather than a cupcake. And the frosting (assuming that I did it right) was not like a buttercream that I have ever tasted. I don't think that I would make these again. But they might have been better with a different kind of frosting.

Now to tell you about Grace's day of baking. While she and Saige were mixing the dry ingredients, Isabelle's cat Puff got into the flour and had flour and sugar everywhere! And then the bowls were knocked over and the eggs were all over the floor! But no worry, Puff just decided that she would lick the bowl.

Oh no Puff! What did you do?

Puff is licking the bowl. And cupcakes are every where!

I hope you're proud of yourself, Puff!

Then after that disastrous day of baking, Grace decided that she needed a nap! 

Grace decided to take a nap after this rough day of baking.

Maybe next month's baking will be better! Stay tuned for September's cupcake of the month. I think it may have something to do with apples!