Pink Lemonade Cupcakes

Pink Lemonade Cupcakes

Last week's fruity flavored cupcake went over so well that I decided to do another fruity flavor...ish. Again, bring on the summer!! I found the recipe on Real Mom Kitchen's blog. Her cupcakes look super cute with all the garnishes. I did not go that far. 

The tough part was that the recipe called for White Cake Mix. I wanted to do it from scratch, so I found a recipe for the cake mix on Chickens in the Road's website. This blog post is awesome. It gives you the recipe for a regular box of cake mix (5 cups worth), and also tells you about the vanilla you would need to add, and how to switch out the powdered milk for regular milk: just replace the water that is included in the pink lemonade recipe with that much milk. Pretty simple enough. Just a lot of substitutions. The other part was the red food coloring I added instead of pink. I did about 5 drops of it into the cake batter, and 3 into the frosting. I also underestimated the amount of zest I would get from one lemon. The 2 tsp it calls for in the cake all came from one lemon. So I needed two lemons just for zest. 

These turned out delicious. Definitely had a sour taste from the pink lemonade packets, but I like sour. I had a friend eat 3 in one sitting! A couple people thought they were too sour, though. So make with caution. The pink lemonade recipe made so much extra frosting that she suggested eating leftover frosting with graham crackers. Tried it. A little too sweet. I liked eating the graham crackers alone more.

They flattened out more as they cooled down. 

I liked the way the frosting turned out. 

Pretty pink! Perfect for summer.