Lemon Meringue Cupcakes
Lemon is one of my favourite flavours and I’ve been wanting to try this lemon meringue cupcake recipe for a while now but haven’t had the time until recently. This is essentially a lemon cupcake, filled with lemon curd, topped with a small meringue.
I made the cupcakes with lemon zest rather than lemon juice, then once they had cooled down, added some lemon curd to the centre. I used a piping nozzle made specifically for fillings, this was a lot easier and less messy than carving out a chunk in the middle, filling it with lemon curd, putting the little lid back on top of the cake. In hindsight, I should have added a little more lemon curd in each cupcake because you couldn’t really taste much of it when you reached the centre.
The meringue, or rather, the italian style meringue – possibly the fiddliest thing I have tried to make! The recipe seemed simple enough to follow – make sure the sugar melts into the water over a medium heat, then when it reaches the soft ball stage, it can be added to the egg whites. My sugar never seemed to reach the soft ball stage…to the point it ended up burning, so when I attempted to add it to the egg white mix, it turned into a caramel-coloured mixture which just never formed into a meringue. I’d almost ran out of eggs by this point, so I ended up making a much simpler meringue – by adding sugar to egg whites and whisking. It turned into a white paint-like substance, but once I had added it to the cupcakes and put them back into the oven, they looked a little more meringue-like. I was careful not to leave them in the oven too long – for fear of burning the cupcake underneath and allowing the meringue to crack too much.
The meringue looked quite secure on top of the cupcake – in reality, it wasn’t – you could just lift the meringue up and it would come straight off the cupcake! The cupcakes were very lemony, with lots of different textures to taste – crunchy, gooey, spongy.
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