Lemon & Vanilla Beauties – my first attempt at the all-popular cupcakes

So, I’ve bent under the mounting pressure to make cupcakes. Every food blog I visit is making cupcakes, red velvet ones, carrot ones, ginger and caramel ones – you name the flavouring, it’s out there in blogland. There are two reasons I don’t bake these days. One – Adriano and Dario prefer not to eat sweet food. Two – I have very little time with a full time job. But this weekend is Easter and so the time issue doesn’t exist and I do happen to like sweet food so, if absolutely pressed to, I can eat them all.
The criteria for what sort I would make rested with the ingredients I had in the cupboard. Vanilla and lemon mightn’t be a traditional combination but that’s what I came up with. Vanilla in the batter and lemon in the icing. It was really quite simple – a bit of sifting, a bit of beating and the cakes were done. While they baked, I threw the icing together and searched high and low for my icing piping set. You know what I mean – that bag thing with different shaped nozzles to make pretty swirls. It was nowhere to be seen and the conclusion I came to was that since I haven’t baked for about a decade and have moved several houses in that time, it has been discarded somewhere along the way. So no delicate patterns with the icing. It was slathered on and a classic cherry stuck on top. How retro is that?
What I can say is they tasted good but I’m sure they rate rather low on an international cupcake scale. Anyway, just in case you are interested, here is the recipe:

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Vanilla & Lemon Cupcakes

Ingredients:
1 1/3 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla

Icing:
Icing sugar
Butter
Milk
Lemon juice

Method:
Sift all dry ingredients together except the sugar.
Beat butter and sugar together, add the vanilla and egg and beat well.
Add some of the flour and then some milk, alternating and mixing well in between.
Fill 12 buttered muffin tins 2/3 full with mixture and cook in a hot oven for 15-20 minutes.
While they are cooking, blend a tbsp or so of butter with a heap of icing sugar, add a little lemon juice and milk to make a stiff mixture.
Pipe on top of the cooled cakes or use a flat knife like I did. Decorate any way you like to make them pretty.