Earl Grey Cupcakes with Lemon Buttercream

My friend Emma had a birthday recently, so naturally some cupcakes were in order. I wanted something with a theme, and she's English, so it was either these or Spotted Dick, and I didn't think the latter would survive the trip in to work very well. And if you know me, you probably know that both my sister and I are tea-obsessives and love working it into recipes. These delicious, delicately citrus-scented cupcakes were just the thing.



You'll find plenty of recipes for earl grey cupcakes on the internet, but none of them really satisfied me, so I sort of made up my own, taking a basic vanilla cupcake recipe from Martha and embellishing it in various ways. These were quite tasty and seemed to be received very well, but to be honest, even though I used more tea here than in most of the other recipes out there, the bergamot flavor still wasn't strong enough for me. Next time I might have to spring for a preposterously expensive bottle of bergamot extract, available here.

Earl Grey Cupcakes
(This recipe makes 24 - I was feeling generous. You can probably halve it with no problems.)

Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups milk
8 bags of earl grey tea, not too fancy
Zest of 1 lemon

Directions

1. Before beginning your cupcakes, heat the milk in a saucepan over medium-low heat until it starts to shake a lot. Dunk in 4 teabags, turn off the heat, and cover for 10 minutes or so. Then squeeze out the teabags into the milk, getting all of that tea-i-ness in there, and refrigerate the milk so it's not warm anymore when it's cupcake time.

2. Preheat the oven to 350 and ready your baking apparatus. Empty the contents of the remaining 4 bags of tea into a food processor and grind up the leaves as small as you can. (This step is optional, I guess, but you don't want big chunks of tea in your cupcakes.)

3. Mix together the ground tea, flour, salt and baking powder and in a small bowl.

4. In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter together until real fluffy, then add the eggs one at a time, beating each one in separately. (I don't know why this is important but everyone says it is.) Beat in vanilla and lemon zest.

5. Measure your tea-milk to make sure it hasn't evaporated; if it's not 1 1/4 cups, make up the difference with regular milk. Then mix in the flour mixture and the milk into your bowl of liquidy stuff, alternating, ending with flour. Mix until everything is just incorporated.

6. Fill up your cupcake liners (not all the way, of course) and bake for 20-22 minutes, or until they pass the fork test. Top with lovely lemon frosting and serve to the birthday girl.

Here they all are laid out for my friends at work. We had ourselves a little cupcake party.



Lemon Buttercream Frosting

This frosting has less butter than your average buttercream, which was really because I ran out of butter, but I think this ended up making the frosting more delicate. It suited the cakes better. (My friend Atalanti told me this, and she had a stint in culinary school.)

My methods are pretty inexact when it comes to frosting, so I'll just explain what I did. Squeeze out your zested lemon into a cup. Cream half a stick of butter with some confectioner's sugar, maybe a cup's worth. Add in a little lemon juice and beat. Keep adding more sugar and more lemon juice until you have an amount and a consistency that works for you. Refrigerate the frosting if you're not going to use it immediately, but let it sit out for 20 minutes or so before piping it onto the cakes.

Here Emma enjoys a birthday cupcake:



Our friends Camille (foreground) and Karina (background) eat their cupcakes.