SRC - Pink Lemonade Cupcakes

Time for another Secret Recipe Club reveal!  I love getting my blog assignment each month and this month I was assigned the blog Cookaholic Wife.   Nichole's blog is just so cute and I love her blog colours! She lives in Maryland with her husband and 2 cats and has been blogging since 2009.

I always love looking through all the recipes on my assigned blogs and for the first time I almost had my husband make my SRC recipe as he makes an outstanding shrimp fried rice and I saw that Nichole had a couple of different shrimp fried rice  recipes, but at the last minute I went with the Pink Lemonade Cupcakes  because I was making cupcakes for my daycare twins' 4th birthday party anyway and I already had purchased pink lemons at Central Market not really having an exact idea of what to do with them, so it just seemed like the perfect choice!

I decided against colouring the cupcakes pink, only because I wanted to colour the frosting pink so I wouldn't have to colour the fondant to make the little number fours, colouring fondant is just a sticky nightmare in my opinion!

I also went with my favourite cream cheese frosting and topped them with the Variegated Pink Lemons.

Cupcakes:
1 box white cake mix
1 tsp pink lemonade drink powder
3 egg whites
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup water
zest from 1/2 a lemon

Cream Cheese Frosting:
1 stick unsalted butter
1 8oz. package cream cheese
Seeds from 1 plumped vanilla bean (vanilla beans plumped in rum for at least 2 weeks)
2 cups icing sugar
Pink food colouring

Preheat the oven to 350 and line a cupcake baking pan with liners.

Mix together the water and lemonade mix.  In the bowl of a stand mixer, add in the cake mix, egg whites, vegetable oil, lemon zest and water mixture.  Beat for 2-3 minutes, fill cupcake liners 2/3 full and bake for 18-20 minutes.

To make the cream cheese frosting in the bowl of an electric mixer beat the butter and cream cheese until smooth. Add the vanilla and icing sugar and beat for 3 minutes, until thick and fluffy, add in a few drops of pink food colouring and mix well.

     

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