Lemon Meringue Cupcakes!

Adapting Recipes

Hello everyone! I hope you are all keeping your spirits up through the horrible weather! I have a spring recipe for you, which might just cheer you up!

I absolutely love lemon drizzle cake and I've been using the same recipe for years! I love adapting recipes to make new ones, so I decided to give this one a bit of a re-vamp. 

I used the BBC GoodFood lemon drizzle cake recipe (available online) but used it to make several cupcakes rather than one big cake. Essentially you can do this with any recipe, just remember that you will end up with more than 12 cupcakes at the end (never seems to be a problem in this house)! The recipe itself is really just a sponge recipe with added lemon zest, you can swap the lemon zest for orange or lime zest if you like, both work well with cakes!

Once baked, I made a small hole in each cupcake using a knife and filled this hole with a good quality lemon curd. This gives an extra hit of lemon goodness! Yum! I then placed the cut out piece of cake on top of the lemon curd filling to cover up the hole.

Instead of making a lemon drizzle icing, I made a lemon buttercream using the lemon curd, butter and icing sugar. The lemon curd gives a really good zingy taste and you get a really smooth finish on your buttercream! 

So lemon meringue cupcakes wouldn't be completely finished without the meringue right? I whipped three egg whites and caster sugar to create my meringues. I then pipped them onto a baking sheet and popped them in the oven on a really low temperature until they were dried out (usually takes about 2-3hours but you can leave them overnight). They will peal off the baking parchment easily when they are ready! I dusted mine with edible glitter (just because).

Meringues can be really tricky to make and I did need to try a few times before my egg whites thickened. The main thing is to make sure all your equipment is clean and free of fat, use a stainless steel or glass bowl as plastic holds in grease. Then its really about patience and knowing when to stop whipping. They say practice makes perfect (or near perfect at least)!

Anyway, I'm very pleased with the end result, they looked and tasted great! Lemon always reminds me of spring, so you could always make these as an alternative or addition to Chocolate Easter eggs!

 Thanks for reading!