Lemon Meringue Mini-cupcakes

Cruising right along on my cupcake adventures, I present MOAR CUPCAKES!

These little beauties were also initially inspired by Martha Stewart.  I used her recipe for Meyer Lemon cupcakes (filled with lemon curd!) and they turned out ridiculously well.  Beyond my expectations for sure.

Basically, they consist of a lemon cake with a lemon curd filling, very tart.  My own ideas were the little meringue cookies added via home-made sweetened whipped cream.  To a certain extent these could be assembled using bought materials: cake mix, lemon curd (possibly), Cool Whip, and meringue cookies.  I had an absolute blast making all the pieces myself, however.

To use Martha’s enormo recipe though, I had to halve it.  From 7 eggs to.. 3.5?  I used 3 whole eggs and an extra white leftover from making the curd (with only yolks) and the meringues (with only whites) and they turned out fine.  The batter style was still a creamed-style cake but baked a bit differently from the chocolate cake previously.  They rose to high domed peaks in the oven and promptly fell flat while cooling.  I don’t think this is a mistake because the picture in the cookbook showed very flat cakes.

I ran into a bit of a problem with my own errors while baking these in a couple of respects.  First, I was very poor at judging how full the tins were (supposed to be 3/4 full) so many of my cupcakes were very very small gems of delicious.  This also increased the number of mini cupcakes I ended up making.  I had to re-use my one mini-cupcake pan 3 times.  Second, while pulling them out of the pan to cool on a rack, I ended up pulling the paper away from the side on a few of them.  While it finished cooling (and shrinking,) it would pull the rest of the way away from the paper on all the sides, very disheartening.  HOWEVER, they were still very delicious and nobody seemed to mind!

To fill these, I waited for them to cool and cut cones from the centers, discarding the tips of the cones, and plopping the tops back over the lemon curd.  My sister helped me make and assemble all the pieces like a BOSS.  I tried using a filling tip for them but I think they were just too small for it to be effective.  Perhaps not and I have no idea how to use a filling tip.

Next, I dolloped whipped cream and plopped a meringue cookie on each.  The meringue cookies were very simple: 1/4 cup of powdered sugar per egg white and I used a bit of cream of tartar.  The lemon curd was from Martha’s cookbook and the whipped cream was simply sweetened to taste and flavored with vanilla.  The only slightly innovative thing I tried here was assembling them early and letting the meringue soften.  I think the crispy cookies was more fun to eat but softened tasted more like lemon meringue pie, which was pretty awesome.  All in all, these were a definite success.  My sister is asking for S’mores next!