Nice and Simple Lemon Cupcakes

As I teased in my previous choco-cinnamint cupcakes, here is another delicious cupcake idea: yellow and purple lemon cupcakes!

When I went to art college, we were taught about colour theory, how each of the primary colours have an opposite and complementary colour: blue goes with orange, red goes with green, and yellow goes with purple. If you're painting a picture and want to dull a colour for a shadow, per se, you don't mix the paint with black, you mix it with its complement.

Of all the complementary colours, my favourite two are yellow and purple. It's such a pretty, floral palette that makes me thing of a pretty summer field. My least favourite is blue and orange: it's extremely hard to get that to look un-garish.

That's why my eye was immediately drawn to these one day a few years ago when I was walking down the homebaking aisle of Tesco....

I saw them and I knew it was fate.

I bought them and thought one day, I'll have a use for these, and that day finally came recently during my cupcake experiments. I thought making some lovely lemon cakes in purple wrappers would be the ideal way to make the best of these decorations.

For these cakes, I made a two-egg quantity of my newly revised cupcakes, adding in a teaspoon of lemon zest along with the vanilla essence. To make the lemon icing for 12 cakes, I mixed together 4 ounces (115 grammes) of room temperature butter with 4 ounces (115 grammes) of shop-bought lemon curd in a bowl with an electric mixer. I then gradually added 8 ounces (225 grammes) of sieved icing sugar and a splash of vanilla essence until I had a lovely soft icing. I then piped this onto the cakes in a swirl using a star-shaped nozzle, and sprinkled with some multicoloured sprinkles before popping a yellow and purple sugar swirl onto each cake.

Lemon cake is a classic, and I have done lemon cupcakes in the past, but I'm very pleased with the revised cake and buttercream recipe!