Lavender Cupcake Experiments

I told a friend about the lavender cupcakes I’d made, and she wanted recipes, so I hereby present these as a community service message. If you want pretty pictures and step-by-step photos, please see the original links. I usually whip out my iPhone as an afterthought.

Last month, I wanted to make something with lavender. I’d had lavender shortbread cookies once and fell in love.

I found food grade lavender in bulk at my local store, and decided to try making lavender cupcakes and looked up cupcake recipes.

All of the recipes have different approaches to incorporating the lavender. The one that made the most sense to me is this:

Combine 1 cup white sugar & about a half teaspoon of lavender flowers in a food processor, and process.

I erred on the side of a little more, but you don’t want too much, just a hint. I did extra and saved it for later.

Then, no matter which recipe you use, just skip the “incorporate flowers” step and sub the lavender sugar for the regular sugar.

First up: a recipe for “healthy” cupcakes from Shape magazine.

They were pretty. You’ll notice the recipe is vague about the icing recipe; it just says to combine the powdered sugar and lemon juice, but not how much lemon juice. I think you need to use quite a bit, and it made it very sour, so I used a bit of milk as well.

My youngest did not like these. My older two did.

I thought they were good. They didn’t taste like diet food (I’m sure there’s still a lot of sugar in them, just not as much fat). But something tragic happened.

The UPS man rang the bell and left me these:

Chocolate!

I’d blurbed a writer, and in gratitude, she sent me these. If you want to see the actual chocolate, look up Vosges. My chocolate pictures look, ahem, unappetizing. The chocolates had names like Absinthe, Black Pearl, and Wink of the Rabbit. And they said to eat them write away, so I had to do it. I HAD to. The box told me!

(Disclaimer: She did not promise me chocolates in exchange for a blurb.)

Anyway, I began eating chocolate, and my desire for the healthy cupcakes drained.

At Easter, I used this recipe for the cake only. Keep in mind this recipe is only for 12 cupcakes, so double it if you need 24.

I didn’t do the lavender cream.

These were delicious because, of course, it uses BUTTER. Butter butter butter.

For the frosting, I wanted a lemon cream cheese.
Instead of coloring it yellow, I colored it lavender with my food coloring.

This frosting recipe makes a LOT. It would probably be good to pipe this on.

This is what they looked like, on their way to the in-laws’ house for Easter dinner.