Tag: blueberry

Lemon cupcakes with blueberry cream cheese frosting

I had some lemons I wanted to use up and decided to make cupcakes for the departmental meeting. While I had another recipe I frequently use and it’s quite popular, it called for sour cream and made about 24 cupcakes. Sometimes it’s nicer to just have a smaller batch. So I decided to try this New York Times recipe which only made a dozen. I like lemon cupcakes with a berry frosting. I prefer strawberry, but what I had on hand was blueberry. The trick to berry frosting is to use some freeze dried fruit. Otherwise, by the time you get enough flavor from the berries, your frosting is watered down. Take the berries and turn them into powder and a food processor and then mix them in with the powdered sugar. I usually do add some fresh as well, but the color and flavor comes mostly from the freeze dried. I just adapted the cream cheese frosting recipe that came with the cupcake recipe and added the blueberries. You can see what a vivid color the berries give the frosting.

The nice thing about taking them to work is I got to bake and I only ate one cupcake and the rest just disappeared to compliments.

Lemon and Blueberry

What finer spring flavor combination is there than citrus and berry. So when a departmental get-together arouse, I decided to try the King Arthur Double Lemon Thumbprint cookies. They recommended either lemon curd or raspberry jam for the filling. with an optional lemon glaze drizzled over. My first thought was to make it a blueberry glaze for contrasting flavor/color, using powdered blueberries. But then I thought, what about a blueberry curd?  So I tried this recipe.

The first step was to boil the blueberries with lemon juice and zest to release the juice. 

The you strain it to remove the skin bits etc. You can see the strainer and bowl in the upper right of the right hand picture. I had a moment of temptation to buy blueberry juice, but the resulting “juice” was a thicker concentrate and I don’t think store bought juice would work, although it would have produced smoother results. Perhaps if one reduced it down by boiling. Once you have the juice, you cook it with the sugar, eggs, and a bit of salt, then pour the hot liquid over the butter. Nice taste but not as thick as I would like for this purpose, so I’d either try a different recipe or tweak this one should I make them again.

I made lemon curd to go on the other half the cookies and did contrasting glazes on both. You might be able to see below the difference in thickness between the blueberry curd chilled over night and the slightly still warm lemon curd. The lemon glaze ended up absorbed by the blueberry curd, but the blueberry glaze remained as pictured below. But both were quite tasty.