Lemon Daisy Cupcakes for Val's Birthday

Today is Val's birthday, and I was in the mood for cupcakes.  In particular, I had been planning for weeks to make cupcakes with daisies on top, as I finally bit the bullet and bought the moulds to make the daisy centres.

When I think of daisies, I think of bright and sunny, which in turn leads me to the colour yellow.  Yellow translated into flavour means lemon - so I made Val lemon cupcakes filled with lemon curd, topped with lemon buttercream frosting, and crowned with a fondant daisy.

The base cupcakes are lemon cream cheese cupcakes from the Sweet Violet Cakes recipe on p91 of the Australian Womens Weekly Cupcakes book. 

To make the cakes, you will need:

90g cream cheese
90g butter
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest
2/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup (50g) self raising flour
1/2 cup (75g) plain flour

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and line a 12 hole muffin tin with cupcake papers.

Beat the butter, cream cheese, zest, sugar and eggs together in a stand mixer until light and creamy.  Add the flours to the mixture and beat on low speed until just combined.

Using an icecream scoop, place the batter into the cupcake papers, and bake the cupcakes in the oven for 25 minutes or until cooked through.  Remove the cakes from the oven and immediately unmould them from the tin onto a wire rack to cool.

 
Once the cupcakes were cool, I used a paring knife to cut a small cone shape out of the centre of the cupcakes, then filled the hole with a small blob of lemon curd.  I cut the tips off the cones and replaced them back on top of the cakes to cover the curd:

 

The recipe that I used to make the lemon curd was from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table.  The recipe is posted online here.  I only made a half recipe and still have stacks left over.  I liked this recipe because it uses whole eggs, so there is no umming and arring about what to do with the whites.

 
I piped lemon flavoured buttercream icing on top of the cakes, using the Primrose Bakery Vanilla Buttercream recipe, and substituting lemon juice for vanilla essence.

 
The day before making the cakes, I made daisies using ready rolled fondant in white and a small amount tinted in yellow, a daisy plunger cutter and  a daisy centre mould.  The centre is stuck to the flower with a little water.  I also painted the daisies with pearl glaze, which really doesn't seem to have made much difference.  I tried to make the daisies dry with curved petals by drying them in a patty cake pan, but only three dried sufficiently to be curved, and they tended to stick to the patty cake pan, despite the pan being dusted liberally with cornflour.  Sweetopia has a great tutorial on how to make these daisies here.

After all that, I had a field of daisies for Val:

 

I think they are really pretty.  Who wouldn't love a bouquet of edible daisies for their birthday?