Australian Women's Weekly's Lemon Cupcakes

I was feeling rather domestic on Friday evening so I decided to bake some lemon cupcakes (well I really didn't want to see the bag of lemons I bought go to waste. I don't know why I buy things just because they're cheap!). The recipe is from the Australian Women's Weekly Cakes Biscuits and Slices book, and their recipes are easy to follow and always turns out well. I picked up a cute cupcake tin from IKEA a few weeks ago which is smaller and narrower than regular cup cake tins so the cakes turn out like little mushrooms! I was actually thinking about decorating the cake with red icing and putting white chocolate buttons to make little toadstools :)

• 125g butter, softened
• 2 teaspoons finely grated lemon rind
• 275g caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 225g self raising flour
• 125ml milk
• 60ml lemon juice

1. Preheat oven to moderate. If making a whole cake, grease 20cm deep round cake tin, line base with baking paper.

2. Beat butter, rind and sugar with electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating until just combined between additions (mixture might separate at this stage, but will come together later). Stir in sifted flour, milk and juice in 2 batches.

3. Pour mixture into pan; bake about 50 minutes. Stand cake for 5 minutes; turn top-side up unto wire rack to cool.

I was oohing and umming about whether to make icing as I tried to search for low fat icing (no such thing!) so I settled on a basic icing (mix 2 cups of sifted icing sugar, 20g melted butter and juice of one lemon) that complimented the cake perfectly.

One of the best products I have found is the disposable icing piping bags by Multix that contains 5 plastic piping bags with 3 nozzles (I was at 2 minds - contribute to more plastic in our landfill or waste litres of water trying to wash a cloth piping bag?). Since Victoria still has water restrictions, I'm afraid I went with the plastic piping bags.

So what do you think? I did a Nigella Lawson and did devour the big cupcake cake straight after I iced it. Bliss!

I only used up 2 lemons... what to do with the other 3?