Vanilla Bean Lemon Cupcakes- and the saga of the butter cream

I am a fly by the seat of my pants kind of cook, a pinch of this, a dash of that, season to taste, readapt. I have to admit I’m a whirl wind in the kitchen. But because of this I can’t follow a recipe to save my life! This style of cooking works well for most things, but not for baking!  So when I was asked to bring dessert for my Grandmother’s Birthday my panicked mind raced through what I could make for her. I have a very short list of things bake well, and figured no one wanted Italian bread for dessert. The last time I made a cake for her, it was a spice cake out of a box that we attempted to frost while not cooled totally, and it fell apart, melted frosting, crumbled cake, and at the end of the day a “scrambled birthday cake.”  This cake had to be better than that and it was with that memory that I decided it was time to finally face my fears of the cupcake.

Now to be honest I’ve never made a cake from scratch before! So I decided I would start my journey with a search for a lemon cupcake and came across an amazing blog http://quartercupkitchen.wordpress.com/ where there was a lovely lemon cupcake that was drool worthy! I made one change using a real vanilla bean instead of vanilla extract because I wanted the specks. I also adapted the language to read the way I read recipes when I cook, but this is really still her recipe.

Lemon Cupcakes (makes 28)

3 cups unbleached flour
2 cups sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 sticks unsalted butter at room temp.
1 cup reduced fat sour cream
3 eggs plus 2 egg yolks
Scrapings of half a vanilla bean
Zest and juice from two lemons

 Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In an electric mixer combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Gently add butter, sour cream, eggs vanilla beans and lemon and mix until combined. Fill lined muffin tins half way full and bake 20-22 minutes turning once throughout.