Lemon Buttercream

With our work's MacMillan Coffee Morning coming up this Friday, I have volunteered to bake and help out for the second year running. I used this excuse to splash out on a cupcake caddy I had been eyeing up from Lakeland.

With another day off planned, this time waiting for a telephone engineer to fit a new phone line, I was too inpatient to wait until Friday to use my new caddy!

So I baked some more lemon cupcakes using the recipe from my previous post (mainly because I had a spare lemon left over and I hate waste). However, I decided to experiment with the icing and try to make a lemon flavoured butter cream topping instead.

Again, this was adapted from a butter cream recipe in Susannah Blake's Cupcake Heaven, the recipe was originally for vanilla butter cream, but I substituted the vanilla essence for freshly squeezed lemon juice instead.

However, as by this point I was running low on Stork (which I used instead of butter), I had to adjust the recipe accordingly and use less on the cakes.

Here is what (I think) the recipe should be if you're not running low on ingredients!:

85g Unsalted Butter at room temperature (I used Stork!)
225g Icing sugar (sifted- if you're really bothered!)
1 tablespoon of milk (although I would suggest adding it in gradually)
1/4 teaspoon of freshly squeezed lemon juice (or to taste, if you do alter the amount you put in, decrease the amount of milk or else it will end up too runny!)

Beat the butter in a bowl until smooth and creamy, then add sugar, milk and lemon juice. Stir until mixed.

However, my technique was different. I worked out that for every 1g of butter used, you need 2.65g of icing sugar. As I had 29g of butter, I mixed with 76g of icing sugar. I then added in roughly equal quantities of lemon juice and milk until the mixture incorporated. being careful not to add too much liquid which would make it runny.

Here is a picture of the finished product put away in the caddy, ready to take to work tomorrow. It's great having this as now only can I now take more cakes into work (I usually take them in a chocolate tin- that can only hold about 6) but I can decorate the cakes with butter cream without fear of disasters!