Lemon-Shortbread cupcakes in Jars.
It’s been a long winter, and here in SoCal, we had almost two months of grey, rainy weather. So much rainy weather that we’ve gotten more rain in since January 1 than we did in all of 2009. And that’s nothing compared to the snow that our friends and family on the east coast have had. Four feet of snow in some places, between January and February’s bad weather.
There have been a few upsides to this wet weather here though. We really do need the rain, and it’s feeding all of the flowers and plants and fruits and vegetables that grow here!
What do we do on icky, wet rainy days? Bake lemon cupcakes, put them in jars and ship them to our friends who were buried in the cold snow!. What did you think we did, play Plants vs. Zombies all day? Okay, we did some of that too. Nothing says ‘icky, wet rainy day’ then happy sunflowers and other plants fighting off endless waves of the ravenous undead.
The lemon shortbread cupcake starts with our usual vanilla cake. It’s cake, it’s vanilla, we’ll mention it a lot as we talk about more flavors in the upcoming weeks. We use homemade vanilla extract, it’s a nice moist cake, and while we don’t subscribe to the belief that vanilla equals boring, we would have to make on vanilla (don’t worry, that’s coming up), to explain our love of it.
Cakes were baked, unwrapped and then put into jam jars. Each jar got one regular sized cupcake and one tiny cupcake. We had a few extra tiny cupcakes – they did not go into jars, they went into us.
Instead we’ll talk about filling that cake with lemon curd made from lemons right from the tree. (SoCal + relative with lemon tree = always having fresh lemons the size of softballs)
We were introduced to lemon curd back when we were living on the east coast. During one of our gaming nights (We play D&D. We are geeks. I mean, come on, we made a werewolf cupcakes at Halloween just so we could make a Three Wolf Cupcake joke.), a friend had brought as part of the snacks, homemade shortbread cookies and a jar of lemon curd to spread on the cookies. The cookies and curd were gone before the first monster was defeated.
Lemon curd is a custard-like fruit spread made from egg yolks, sugar, butter, fruit juice and zest. We make ours from scratch, which means it’s a fair amount of work zesting all those lemons, and whisking the curd while it cooks so it remains smooth, but it’s worth it. It’s quite tart and compliments the sweet vanilla cake perfectly.
The lemon curd that doesn’t go inside the cupcakes gets added to cream cheese frosting. It’s hard not to eat it right out of the bowl – and leftover frosting doesn’t last very long in our house, even when we generously frost the cupcakes. The great thing about cream cheese frostings is that because they’re less sweet than a standard buttercream, you can afford to frost with a heavy hand and not overwhelm the cupcakes.
Topping that frosting? Crushed cookies. Smashing cookies is fun, everyone should get to do it at least once.
We got do do this twice, because we had two kinds of lemon cookies on hand. Half the cupcakes got pieces of lemon shortbread, the other half were topped with lemon-flavored waffle cookies. Think waffle-cones, but as a cookie. Incidentally, the waffle cookies are excellent for scooping the last of the leftover frosting out of the bowl.
As we said, this time around, the cupcakes were in jars and were shipped all over the country, to unanimous response of “NOM NOM NOM” and “MORE PLEASE” and “I ATE ONE FOR BREAKFAST!” We find nothing wrong with eating cupcake-in-a-jar for breakfast. We’re grown-ups now and it’s our turn to decide what that means.
