I love baking cupcakes because they’re easy and the perfect size to eat! Plus, if you want to make a few different versions it’s easy to create a variety pack of sorts to pass out to family members or friends. Since my cookbooks were still packed I took to the internet to try and find a recipe for lemon cupcakes and then one for strawberry cupcakes. I wouldn’t normally do a post with two different items, but since I didn’t take a picture of each type of cupcakes separately it’ll have to do.

For the lemon cupcakes I found a great recipe from Real Simple that looked pretty easy and didn’t make a ton of cupcakes. These smelled wonderfully the entire time I was making them and were super easy to make. They did bake a little weird (kind of cone shaped), but I’m not totally convinced that wasn’t our oven since it appears to be on it’s last leg. Thankfully the icing covered that up so no one else could tell! The icing tasted great, but it was a little runnier than I would have liked, but I’ve gotten bad about eyeing icing so that’s my fault. Plus it’s getting warm around here so humidity might have been a factor there too. Unfortunately I didn’t realize that until after I had piped the first one, but I just decided to stick with it anyway.

My mom loves strawberry cupcakes and has a specific recipe she uses but I always manage to forget about that when I go to make them. I’ll just go ahead and note that while I love strawberries, I am not the biggest fan of strawberry cupcakes. I’ll eat one if that’s all there is, but if given a choice I’m more likely to go for something else first. The cupcakes also come out weird and while I still think our oven played a factor, the moisture in the strawberries also probably affected the outcome. My husband used to bake for a cupcake shop and said they usually microwaved the strawberries and then strained them to help drain off the moisture (side note: you could use the juice to help thin out the icing rather than milk to give it a more strawberry flavor). I’ve tried a couple of different versions of strawberry cake/cupcakes and this fell in the middle for overall strawberry taste. I think the icing tasted most like strawberry, but like the lemon cupcakes it was a little runny as well, but like I mentioned with the lemon icing it’s probably because I’m eyeing things and was too lazy to thicken it up a little and/or the humidity.

Overall, both recipes were easy, made about a dozen each, and according to those that helped taste test they were a hit!

Recipe Used: Lemon Cupcakes (from Real Simple) & Strawberry Cupcakes (from Life, Love, and Sugar)