Day 50 – Iced Tea Cupcakes with Lemon Frosting

Happy Tip Thursday!!  Check out the video for today!  Thank you to reader Sarah P for helping us with today’s clip.

I figured we needed a little reminder of summer before it’s gone.  I’m not complaining!  I love the fall.  But let’s “cool off” with these while we still want to!   Iced Tea Cupcakes with Lemon Frosting (recipe below from Pretty B!tc#es Can Cook Too) – name changed slightly to keep it family-friendly 🙂

    

The cupcake is very dense (the mini is almost too dense to eat).  It has a black tea taste, but not a strong one.  It’s almost like a bran muffin flavor.

The frosting is very thick and extremely easy to pipe.  It tastes a little bit like one of those candied lemons.  Ya know, the chewy lemon wedges coated in sugar!

    

Together, a lot of the tea flavor is lost.  Nothing gets by the lemon in that frosting.  The frosting has a refreshing bite that you can’t get with butter, because it’s made with shortening, which has a lower fat content.  It releases a lemon rind flavor – gives it a little sparkle (that’s a direct quote from my husband, by the way…). I also don’t see how that frosting can frost all 24 cupcakes, unless you only put a thin layer on each cupcake.  So, have spare ingredients on hand, just in case.

Scoring Sheet:

– Cupcake Taste: 2

– Frosting Taste: 3.5

– Overall Taste: 2.5

– Appearance: 2.5

– Ease of Making: 3 (steeping tea is pretty time-consuming – and don’t forget to squeeze the tea bags, or you don’t get all the juice)

– TOTAL: 13.5

RECIPE

Iced Tea Cupcakes with Lemon Frosting (recipe from Pretty B!tc#es Can Cook Too)

Ingredients for Iced Tea Cupcakes Recipe
1 cup milk
10 black tea bags
1/2 cup water
1 cup unsalted butter
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs, room temperature
2 3/4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon table salt

Lemon Frosting
1/4 cup salted butter, room temperature
1/4 cup butter flavored shortening
1 1/2 – 2 cups powdered sugar
2 teaspoons lemon extract
Zest of one lemon

Garnishes
Sparkling Sugar (white or clear)

Lemon Candy Sticks

Sugared Fruit Wedges

For directions visit Pretty B!tc#es Can Cook Too.

*Tomorrow: Almond Buttercream Cupcakes*