chick cupcakes

Easter Chick Cupcakes
Makes 12 cupcakes

For the raspberry lemonade cupcakes:
4 tbsp. (57 grams) butter, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 tbsp. lemon zest
1 tsp. raspberry extract
1/3 cup milk
1 cup all purpose flour

For the frosting:
1 cup granulated sugar
3 tbsp. water
2 egg whites
1 1/2 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. lemon juice
Yellow gel food coloring

Additional things:
Royal icing
Food gel coloring in black and orange
Parchment paper
A large, round tip
Yellow sanding sugar (optional)

For this little project, you can really use any flavor of cupcake you want and you can flavor the frosting with whatever extract you’d like, but you’ll want to use the frosting recipe above because it’s very light and will hold its shape well. It’s also a meringue-like frosting (often called boiled icing or 7 minute icing) and will develop a skin on the outside the longer it’s exposed to air so it can’t be made in advance and the cupcakes really shouldn’t be frosted more than a day in advance. Since I detailed how to make these cupcakes and frosting in another post, I’ll simply refer you to that rather than going through all the same instructions again here. You can find my post for raspberry lemonade cupcakes here.