Sweet Treats Saturday: Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

As you can see, I'm on a cupcake roll.  Not only that, but I thought I would try something completely new. I love to bake, but there are a few things I haven't made yet for a few reasons:

1. Creme Brulee: I have a torch, but playing with fire scares me.
2. French macaroons: There's only so many steps I can take while making something, and the thought of making it look so uniform makes me grimace.
3. Meringue: a) That's a whole lot of egg whites, b) what do you do with all of those yolks? c) it's just intimidated me.

Well, I stumbled upon a lemon cupcake recipe the other day while surfing the Cake Journal blog that had a meringue frosting.  Normally I would have just substituted the frosting for another kind, but I was feeling gutsy, and had a lot of eggs in the fridge.

Lemon zest

Spring liners

The cupcakes were your standard vanilla cupcakes with a lemon full of fresh zest.  That was the easy part.  I baked them in some cute spring wrappers (it's a beautiful, sunny day in the California Bay Area), and started inching towards the eggs that were glaring at me.

The hubby separated all of the whites and yolks for me (I keep him around for things like this), and placed them in a cute little lemon bowl (to stay on theme of course).

Lemon bowl filled with egg whites.

Add a bucket load of sugar, some vanilla, and mix.  So far so good.  Now onto the scary part - the double broiler.  I've done this method for plenty of things but the thought of doing it for finicky eggs was a daunting task.  I made sure to keep the water at a simmer and stirred constantly.  I couldn't find my candy thermometer so I just eyeballed it to see when the sugar was dissolved.

Mixing bowl in a pot on the stove.

Afterwards, I reattached the bowl to my stand mixer and let it whisk on high for about 5 minutes.  The recipe said it could take up for 12 or more minutes, but mine made it to stiff peaks pretty fast.  And there it is. Beautiful, fluffy, marshmallow like, meringue frosting.

Meringue

I was so pleased with the results, and it made a ton! I definitely could have made a second batch of cupcakes and still had enough.

A beautiful cupcake on my new Crate and Barrel plate.

I piped some extra onto wax paper just to see how it would hold up.  Maybe a treat for later?

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