Lemon and poppyseed cupcakes

As you may recall, I work as a Teaching Assistant in the Home Economics department of one of our city's high schools - a job I really enjoy (I love baking, almost did my teaching diploma after my Uni degree, and quite like kids too ;) ).  So anyway, one of the classes we're teaching this year involves a food development unit.  The pupils were told to think of an item they could make for sale in a coffee shop that would fit in well with the baked goods already on offer, but be new and different so as to encourage customers to buy it.

They brainstormed for a while, and we chatted about what might work and why.  Then I was tasked with finding a lemon recipe that we could use in class - so it had to be easy enough for the pupils to do themselves, within the right timescale to fit into a period and with ingredients that we could easily purchase.

BBC Good Food to the rescue! I really like the huge range of tried and tested recipes they provide, plus the colours and photography are great.  I find that the recipes usually work for me, so felt confident in looking for one there.  I settled upon their Lemon & Poppyseed cupcakes, and that choice was approved by my teacher - so we were good to go.

It started out well, one pupil in each team making the sponge, the other the icing.  One pupil was alone, so I joined her and we worked together to get the cupcakes into the oven in time.  And the result?  Oh my, they were delicious!!  

The buttercream was lemony and rich, not too sweet or tart, and the sponge was light and fluffy and had just the right amount of lemon zest.  Mmm...

Super Lemon cake

One of my colleagues has a name starting with S.  She's fairly unassuming, doesn't like to blow her own trumpet, and likes lemon flavoured cake most of all.  So when I noticed it was her birthday coming up, well... I couldn't let it pass without a little bit of fanfare!

I bought some of Lakeland's fantastic PushPans a year or two ago and love using them.  They give a great shape and bake up well every time. I own some in 6" and some in super-tiny and cute 4", and it was the latter I decided to use this time - as some of the senior students had said they planned to buy her a cake for her birthday.

I used my normal sponge cake recipe and instead of adding vanilla extract for flavour, I added Star Kay White lemon plus the zest of a lemon.  I'm really impressed with their extracts, as the flavour is authentic without tasting artificial, and a few drops give lots of flavour - so the icing consistency isn't ruined.  Perfect.

I joined the two layers of cake with the buttercream and some extra delicious lemon curd, and added both the lemon extract and some yellow colouring to achieve the perfect taste and colour for my buttercream.  With the addition of a little fondant sugarpaste decoration of a Superman style capital letter S in bright pink, we were good to go.

And I'm thrilled to say that S loved her cake, and it was just the right size to last her and a friend a couple of days.  

Baked lemon cheesecake, Donna Hay style

The recipe for this Baked Lemon Cheesecake was in the same Sunday colour supplement as the previous Cinnamon Cheesecake post, and is also a Donna Hay recipe.  It had a fresh whipped cream topping, but I didn't feel that it would add much to the taste, so decided against using it.  The recipe was fairly straightforward to follow and I had the cake ready for the oven fairly soon.  Mmm, fresh lemon rind, yummy!

A quick sprinkling of icing sugar and this baby was ready to serve.  And oh my, was it good!!  I posted the initial photo on my Facebook page at the time, and got great feedback from just the photo!  As it was made not long after the cinnamon cheesecake, we were more than happy to share.  Just be sure to have a hot cup of coffee, or cold glass of milk, ready when you have your slice...

Lemon curd filled lemon cupcakes, mmm

As the yellow from the rainbow cake was such a lovely shade, and we had lemon curd at home, it seemed only right to try out the lemon cupcake recipe.  We had a do at one of Mr Becca's colleagues' homes today, a family day, and he'd volunteered me to bring a dessert item.  Team Becca are all kind of over cake and cupcakes, so to switch things up a bit I used lemon zest and juice in the batter.  I had some coloured muffin cases (I use these, as opposed to cupcake cases) so thought they'd look more fun in matching yellow cases.  I cored then filled the baked cupcakes with lemon curd and put some lemon curd into the buttercream too - along with a touch of the yellow food colour.

And guess what?!  They went down a storm at the lunch, and with all the Team,  woo hoo!  Everyone agreed that they were deliciously lemony not too sweet or tart.  They're a definite winner...