Heck Versus The Lemon

I do not consider myself a baker, nor do I find baking relaxing. Baking causes a huge mess and it’s about a 50-50 chance that whatever I mix together and shove into my oven will turn out to be immediately thrown away.

With today being Father’s Day, my hard-working and well deserving husband is expecting two things: bacon for breakfast and for me to ignore each cupcake he eats throughout the day.

I never make the same cupcake twice. I almost always use a box mix, but will change the required ingredients. This box happened to be lemon and called for 1 ¼ cups of water, 1/3 cup of oil and 3 eggs. I decided to switch to 1 cup of whole milk, ¼ cup of lemon juice, 1/3 cup of sour cream and 3 eggs. To kick it up a notch, I decided to try something totally new: candied lemon peel.

While my tweaked cupcakes incubated in the oven, I started the process of candying lemon peel. First, I rolled the lemons on the counter top to bring out the juice. Then I cut them in half and squeezed the fresh juice into a measuring cup (for icing, later). I used a small knife to scrape the pulp and the bitter, inner, white layer of the lemon. I brought two cups of water to a boil, tossed the lemon peel into the pot and left them alone for about five minutes. I removed the peels and added two cups of sugar to the hot lemon water.

I sliced the peels and then put them back into the thick boiling nectar. When the thin yellow slices of peel were partially see through, I removed them and spread them out on parchment paper to cool. Twenty one minutes after I began the baking process, my lemon cupcakes were ready to cool down.

The easiest icing in the world: a few tablespoons of powdered sugar and the juice from half a lemon stirred together makes my favorite icing; mostly because I love lemon, but also because it’s so easy! I must admit that because I’m not a dedicated baker, I didn’t know about this icing until a couple weeks ago. The first bite of my friend’s blueberry pound cake with lemon icing on top and I was in love…

Anyway, I drizzled the icing over the cupcakes and topped them with my slivers of candied lemon peel. I couldn’t help but taste one of the cupcakes (actually, I ate the whole cupcake). The icing is amazing, and the lemon peel is a nice touch. The cupcake has a slightly off taste to it, like cheap lemon candy. So, after all is said and done next time, I’ll make lemon cupcakes from scratch.