"Kurt's" Key lime cupcakes

I am now calling the key lime cupcakes Kurt's key lime cupcakes. I made them on Saturday at his request. The recipe is as follows:

Kurt's Key Lime Cupcakes

For the cupcakes                                                                   For the filling

1 cup  (2sticks) sweet butter, softened                             1/3 cup key lime juice

1cup superfine sugar                                                            14oz can condensed milk

2 cups self rising flour

4 eggs                                                                                     For the meringue 

1 tsp. vanilla extract                                                            3 eggs whites

                                                                                               1/4 tsp. cream of tartar

                                                                                               1/3 cup granulated sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place 18 paper baking cups in muffin pans. Placed all of the cupcake ingredients in a large bowl, and beat with an electric mixer until smooth and pale, about 2-3 minutes. Spoon the batter into the cups. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove pans from the oven and cool for 5 minutes. then remove the cupcakes from the pan and cool on a rack.

For the filling,  combine the lime juice and condensed milk in a small bowl. Remove the top from each cupcake and hollow out a small hole. Spoon the filling into the hole and replace the top. 

For the meringue, beat the eggs and cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Add 1/3 of the sugar and beat for 1 minute. Repeat until all of the sugar has been added. increase the oven temperature to 450 degrees. Spoon or pipe the meringue on top of the cupcakes. Bake for 5 minutes until golden. Store for no more than 1 day in an air tight container.

Makes 1 1/2 dozen

Before Starting out Kurt agreed to be the food taster for my project. I was missing a few ingredients and had to got to the store for them. Luckily I live withing walking distance to the local grocery store, Harris Teeter. I picked up some Key lime juice, eggs, self rising flour, superfine sugar, and milk because we needed some at home. I got all the way home and realized that I had forgot to pick up sticks of butter. Then irritated at my constant forgetfulness I turned around and went back to the store for butter sticks.

Now that I had everything I began putting the ingredients together. Butter, sugar, flour, eggs check. Next? Vanilla. There was a bottle of extract on the counter from a cake I had previously baked that was the same shape and size as my vanilla so i picked it up measured out a tsp. and threw it in... uh oh, that was not vanilla. It turned out that it was the butter flavor extract and not vanilla. A little concerned I convinced myself that since there was already butter in the mix it would not change the flavor. I then measured out a tsp. of VANILLA and went on my way. Compared to the boxed cake batter this batter was very thick. This was nice during the process of filling the cups because it did not run and drip everywhere. 

While the cupcakes were baking I started the filling. This was a piece of cake! Key lime juice, meet condensed milk. Done. I was nervous about how this mixture would taste so I ran out to the living room with the bowl to my taste tester. He was extremely apprehensive about tasting the mixture saying he would only taste the finished product. He first asked if this was the cake mixture, or the meringue. To which I said "no it is the filling. Just try it!" I laughed as he dabbed the smallest amount possible onto his finger and tasted. "Not bad." He said as he dabbed a larger spoonful onto his finger. Ultimately he decided that the mixture tasted just like the key lime yogurt that we love. When the cupcakes were ready for the filling I decided to use a filling tip and pipe the filling into the cupcakes instead of hallowing them out. This worked great. 

The meringue was very tough. Getting just the egg white was the first challenge. I have a separator but the dang yolk kept slipping through the sides along with the whites. I got two whites into the bowl and had Kurt do the last one because he is usually great at everything he takes on. Only he ended up cracking the yolk into the egg whites I had spent so much time getting. So we had to start again. This time we used a separate bowl to separate the yolks and to store the whites. Once we had that situation under control we added the tartar and stirred, and stirred, and no peaks ever really formed. We continued with the stirring with little results. So we started adding the sugar. The mixture was looking meringue like but never did thicken up. I was disappointed about this because I had plans to pipe on the mixture to look like the picture int the book but I ended up spooning it on because it was so runny! I baked it at 450 for close to 5 minutes until they were golden on top like in the picture.

We let the cupcakes cool and then dug right in! They were delicious. The food critique/ taste tester decided they needed more filling. I determined that they should be more moist. I figure I could attain this in the future by either baking them for less than 20 minutes or adding a little water to the mix. As for the meringue... I guess  maybe if we add more tartar from the get go we might see those peaks they were talking about in the directions. Over all they were great cupcakes.

Next I will be making the oh so scary pesto and basil cupcakes due to a high interest from my readers. :-) (Actually I read through the ingredients and it sounds like it could be pretty tasty!) 

Please comment what you would like after basil pesto...

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