Lemond Drop cupcakes = Epic Fail

Okay, that might be a bit of hyperbole there. I wouldn't really say they're an EPIC fail, but a fail none the less. Which is sad. I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I hate it when something that I'm baking doesn't turn out. I don't get so upset when something I'm cooking doesn't turn out, because I'm not a very good cook. Baking is a different thing though. I'm generally good at it, so it makes me mad when it doesn't do what I wanted it to, i.e. be delicious.

I got the recipe for these out of Better Homes and Gardens most recent cupcake issue. They sounded amazing and looked even classier. With a big glazed lemon wheel garnishing the top of the artfully done cakes, I was so excited about these cupcakes. You can see the picture and get the recipe here: Lemond Drop Cupcakes

Alas, my cupcakes didn't look like that at all.

Here's how it happened.

First off, my mistakes. I didn't use Limoncello because I didn't want to hunt around the local liquor stores for it, and since The Gamer doesn't drink at all and I rarely do, I didn't really figure I wanted a bottle sit around for the next four or five years until I got around to using it in enough things. I suppose there is a chance that I might someday have guests over that like to drink (most of my friends do) but that's beyond the point. I used milk instead and tossed some of the crushed lemondrops in it to try to give it some lemony flavor.

Next, the recipe in the magazine was not very well written. It left out the step at the end of the online one where you roll the finished cupcake in the crushed candies. Or how they could be replaced with those pretty lemon slices. They were right smack-dab in the middle of the recipe. "That's odd" I thought. "Oh well, lets just toss them in and see what happens." This was not the smartest thing I've ever done.

I also don't really have any kitchen implements that are appropriate to crushing hard candies. I put the candies in plastic bad and pounded on them with a hammer until they were mostly crushed. This worked okay, but there were still some pretty big chunks. I thought it might add some texture, so I left it.

I also over-filled the cupcake wrappers my first batch. Second came out better, and you can see a marked difference between the two.

First batch is on the left, second is on the right. They're much nicer. I also might have overbaked the first batch because I was waiting for them to spring up when I touched them, as cupcakes are supposed to do. The time given in the recipe was woefully short (granted, my oven runs cool) and even the good ones had the toothpick coming clean closer to 22 minutes than 18.

The biggest disappointment with these though, is that rather than baking into the cake and giving wonderful nuggets of awesome in the center, the lemon candies sunk to the bottom and melted onto the wrapper. Making it nearly impossible to pull the wrapper off without ripping off the bottom half of the cupcake. Which was very very sad.

I will say that the overall flavor of the cupcakes was nice and light and lemony, although I added about 2 Tbs. of lemon juice on top of the original recipe because the batter just wasn't tasting like I wanted it to. They were very light, almost too light to the point of being crumbly and hard to eat.

The lemon buttercream was also very tasty. Very strong lemon flavor without being too sweet or too tart, but very very rich. That's why I tried to give it a thinner coating with a smaller icing tip, because I thought a big ol' cupcake swirl would be too much and overpower the cupcake. Even trying to go light on the icing, I ran out about 3/4 through.

The biggest fail though, was the glazed lemon slices. Take another look at the ones from the recipe: lemon drop cupcakes

Okay, here's how mine turned out.

To put it mildly, not well.

I'm not entirely sure what I did wrong, other than obviously burning the sugar instead of glazing them. I'm going to blame it the fact that they were cooked on top of the stove instead of inside the oven. As I mentioned before, I'm not much of a cook.

So there you have it. My first cupcake failure. We're all human I guess, and I'm still looking for a rocking lemon cupcake recipe. If you know of one, leave it in the comments, I'd really appreciate it!