National Lemonade Day and National Cupcake Day--Combined!

First, no I am not missing two posts.  The last two days were a wash.  They were both "life happens" day, which isn't nationally recognized by Congress.  If it was, I'd have been very successful.  Oh well, "life happens," and I have to move forward.

Today was full of "Days."  I chose two of them and decided to mix them up....literally.  It was both National Lemonade Day (super yummy) and National Cupcake Day (super duper yummy).  This one has been on my radar for a while now, with my desire to have a lemonade cupcake increasing ever so much as the day creaped closer.  Now, my reflection in the mirror of my hips is screaming "stay away," but I am choosing to ignore it today.  I have eaten a lot of salmon and fresh veggies the last little while, so I'm snubbing my loud-mouthed hips and having a cupcake (or two).

There are a billion recipes out there, but they really boil down to a handful of different basic recipes.  Hmmm...which one inspires me?  First dilemma, what flavor.  There's the delicious stand-by of the good old fashioned lemonade;  then the combinations start to come into play...raspberry lemonade, strawberry lemonade, pink lemonade, other flavors other people have come up with lemonade.  I made it easy...I sent my husband to the store to get the ingredients and told him to pick whichever flavor of lemonade he wanted.  Whew, glad that task is taken care of! (The other part about sending him to get it all...he got two of everything "just in case" I "decided to make double or messed up or something."  How sweet of him, I think.)

Here is what I created:

They were good.  I tweaked the cupcake batter.  I made up my own version of the frosting, and it needed to be stiffer.  I also need to work on my swirl.  Guess a job at Dairy Queen may have come in handy.  All in all, for a first time, I didn't do too bad.  I think that I will play around with both the cupcake and frosting recipes and perfect them, maybe try a homemade cupcake rather than starting from a box mix.  That's for when I feel industrious.  I want more lemonade in my cupcake and less in my frosting.  It would be fun to put some lemon zest or yellow sugar on top, or a lemon wedge decoratively placed like they are in the fancy pictures.  I can pretend I'm a gourmet baker.  Actually, there is lemon zest in the frosting, so I'm a little fancy.

Next time, I might try strawberry lemonade with a strawberry filling of some kind and a whipped topping style frosting, AND I DON'T HAVE TO WAIT FOR NATIONAL LEMONADE DAY OR CUPCAKE DAY!  I can work on my swirl, too.