Lemon Blueberry Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

As promised, I took another set of cupcakes for a test drive last weekend in preparation for my upcoming baby shower!  I thought it would be appropriate to complement the chocolate peanut butter cupcakes with something very opposite.  I chose Lemon Blueberry Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting because they seemed the perfect counterpart.  Instead of rich and heavy, they are light and fresh!  Pick your poison!  (Oh, that actually makes me feel kind of glum when I consider the fact that sugar is actually poisoning us.  #tryingnottothinkaboutit )  Well, moving on!

My husband was my co-taste-tester.  His memory is somewhat selective when it comes to trying my food.  If he likes it, it often gets described as “Oh my gosh, the best ________ I’ve ever had!”  And this was, in fact, the case for the lemon blueberry cupcakes.  He did love them, and he may have used his flair for the dramatic to honor them with this superlative.  Whether he’s actually eaten a better cupcake in his life or not is probably irrelevant.  I’d say that they received a passing score and are certainly fit to be served to the guests at a baby shower.

Dan prefers subtle sweetness to overt sweetness, and thus usually prefers a muffin to a cupcake.  (Who knows what the difference is anyways?)  He thought these cupcakes had a little bit of a muffin vibe, and maybe that’s why he liked them so much.  I also found them to be delicious and could have eaten twenty of them.

Here’s a pet peeve I have about cupcakes.  Usually, the most marketable cupcakes have a HUGE heap of frosting on them.  There’s often just as much frosting as there is cake which, in my opinion, is disgusting.  A little frosting is an enhancement.  A mouthful of frosting makes me want to gag.  But the world (and especially the internet world of food blogs) seems to demand beautiful puffy clouds of frosting on their cupcakes!  What’s wrong with us?!  I know these don’t look as fancy.  Frankly, I wouldn’t know how to create the tall pile of frosting on a cupcake anyways.  Nonetheless, these are designed for taste.

I found this recipe upon random Google search, and it was a winner!  You can find a link to the recipe at Baker By Nature, a cool food blog I hadn’t seen before.  Now I’m excited to see what else she’s been up to!  She recommends including some lemon extract to enhance the lemon flavor.  I did, in fact, do this, and I thought they were just the right amount of lemony, so I would definitely include the lemon extract again.  The frosting recipe was also perfectly lemony, and I can imagine finding it useful in a variety of other applications too!  There are plenty of cake flavors that would be well-served with a bright lemon frosting!

These will be extra perfect when spring finally arrives!  Hope you enjoy!