Icing cupcakes really should be left to the day of – especially with a cream cheese based frosting like this one. This recipe required room temperature butter and cream cheese so I set the alarm really early to set them out, then crawled back in bed for a few rounds of the snooze button. I’ve found that setting everything out the night before, and even counting out the refrigerated items and setting them aside in the fridge really helps. My brain doesn’t always fire at top speed so early in the morning.
This icing recipe was a lemon cream cheese frosting so it had some fresh squeezed lemon juice from the bald lemons that I zested the day before into the batter. I used the same pastry bag for the icing, but found that a half a batch of icing was easier to handle than the whole thing.
I felt like the cupcakes were simple and delicious on their own, but still… cupcakes just sort of call for a little something special. I had some leftover royal icing from the shower cookies so I tried piping out a few hundred different shapes – flowers, dots, butterflies, etc. – onto wax paper and leaving them to harden over night. They turned out to be just the thing these cupcakes needed.
We tried the extras this afternoon for lunch. Yum. Light and tasty, finished and delivered. Bulk baking complete… for this weekend at least.
The cups keep the coverings off the icing during transport – a little double stick tape on top kept the paper from flying off in the breezy morning air. Thank goodness it was a slow Sunday, because I was taking those corners pretty slow and steady this morning.
One hundred and fifty cupcakes. We have our table back now, and enjoyed lunch (at home) for a change!
