Sweet Tooth Saturday

I don't know about you, but I really love making (and eating) desserts. Sure, the stuff that comes before is great too, but a really good dessert? Hands down one of the best things ever.

I got into making cupcakes a while back when the amazing Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World came out. Since then I've started playing around with my own flavor combinations and making up recipes. Some are better than others (ask me about the licorice cupcakes I made last Halloween sometime...), but these latest ones are definite winners:


Lemon cupcakes with blackberry filling and a lemon buttercream frosting. Yum! Like a lot of my cooking and baking, this recipe was inspired by odds and ends in the kitchen that needed using up quickly. I had a few lemons that were heading towards overripe, and also some leftover blackberry flummery (basically a blackberry sauce concoction...I thickened it up on the stove a bit for use here, I've written the recipe to just use blackberry jam since I eventually wound up with that general consistency).

This recipe makes about a dozen cupcakes, although I think I could have stretched it to 13 or 14 if I had been using regular rather than "jumbo" liners. You will need:

Dry ingredients
1 1/4 c. flour
2 tbsp arrowroot powder
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt

Wet ingredients
1 c. milk
3/4 c. sugar
1/4 c. lemon juice
1/3 c. canola oil
1 tbsp vanilla extract
zest of 1 lemon

Filling
3/4 c. blackberry jam or preserves. Blueberry would probably also work well.

Frosting
1/2 c. margarine or shortening
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 c. soymilk
2 c. confectioners sugar

1. Preheat oven to 350F and prepare a muffin tin with 12 cupcake liners.

2. In a mixing bowl, combine all of the wet ingredients (including sugar).

3. In a separate bowl, sift together dry ingredients.

4. Add dry ingredients into wet and stir together. It's important not to stir the batter for too long--no more than a few minutes. Don't worry if there are still a few lumps in the batter

5. Spoon batter into cupcake liners. I like to use a 1/4 c. measure and a silicone spatula to get the batter into the liners.

6. Bake at 350F for 20-25 minutes, until cupcakes are slightly browned. Remove from oven and transfer to a cooling rack. Allow cupcakes to cool completely before filling or frosting.

7. When cupcakes are cooled, poke a hole in the top of each one with a knife or your (clean) index finger. Load all but a few spoonfuls of the blackberry jam into an icing bag with a fairly wide tip attached. For each cupcake, place the tip into the hole you've poked and squeeze gently. After the cupcakes are filled, spread the remaining jam in a thin layer across the top of the cupcakes:


8. Prepare the frosting. With a hand mixer, cream the margarine, lemon juice, and soy milk and frosting together. Slowly sift in confectioner's sugar.

9. Frost the cupcakes! You can either spread with a knife or use an icing bag and tip to get fancy. Since these cupcakes are already spread with a jam layer, the icing bag route will give a tidier finish, but either will result in delicious cupcakes.