The long-awaited Lemon Cupcakes turned out quite tasty (lovely lemon flavor), but too dense/heavy to be worth sharing the recipe yet. Not sure what the problem is. Could be:
~ too many ground almonds weighing the batter down?
~ too much whole wheat pastry flour?
~ overmixing? I used the KitchenAid stand mixer, but was only making a small batch (six cupcakes), and the quantity of batter was too small for the machine/bowl. I had to run it longer to get things mixed in.
I'll try again, and post when/if I get it right.
The frosting is nice and lemony, but again, no recipe, as I started with a small bit of leftover cream-cheese honey icing I found in the freezer, added some butter, lemon juice, more conf. sugar and whipped it all up until fluffy. It was too cold to come through the piping star tip well, as you can see, but that didn't interfere with our dining enjoyment.
We'll be eating the last two of these tonight as we ring in the New Year in our usual low-key, at-home, early-to-bed way.
I've probably done the least holiday baking of any cook in blogland, BTW, one reason it's been so quiet here. I didn't make even a single batch of cookies this year. Things I have made have been mostly thrown together with no recipe at all, like the apple crisp I made for Thanksgiving, using some stale multi-grain pancake mix that needed to be used up, plus some rolled oats, a little butter, an egg, and a couple of big spoonfuls of yogurt. It was quite tasty, too, and achieved my goal of being equally good as either dessert or breakfast. But I forgot to take a picture of it before it was gone.
XMas dessert was also a dual-duty effort: pear coffee cake. I do have a snap of that, and it's on my list of blogging topics to catch up on (here and elsewhere) as we get into the new year. First, though, hubby and I are heading to Waikoloa for a long weekend, hoping to see some sun (22" of rain since Christmas!) and hit the beach.
(Don't know what's up with Blogger today, have tried to insert paragraph spaces three times with no success. Sorry it's all run together, but fixing it appears to be beyond my power.)
