The try and try again lemon poppy seeds cupcakes

Sometimes, it's hard to be positive. It's so easy to fall into the trap of saying "here comes another week" or "another Monday" and indeed, I feel the same way occasionally. I had a conversation with a friend and we were saying how perhaps it is so much more bearable to say "the next weekend is approaching" afterall, it's only a few days away! =) That is what I will be telling myself this week.

I had abit of a disaster cupcake session last weekend.



How do you like my zombie cupcakes? I was so horrified that I fell off the chair laughing! At that point, I decided to make my 2nd batch of cupcakes. In case you are wondering, they are supposed to be lemon n poppy seeds!

Ok, I used another recipe but this one still looked a little weird.... The texture appeared way too dry to me. Nevertheless I frosted it...
and almost fell off my chair again. Notice how watery the frosting is? It was so hard trying to control the movement of the buttercream. Later in the week, I realised that it was because I used icing mixture instead of pure icing sugar. Also, I wasn't using the usual brand of butter, and I suspect there was a tad too much water content in that butter/oil blend spread. The neighbours' kids seemed to like it though...they finished everything!

Still dissatisfied, I proceeded to make my THIRD batch of cupcakes. By this time, I spent the whole afternoon + evening in the kitchen. It was the feeling of "I'm going to get this right! grrrr"

This time round, I used the Lemon cakes with passion fruit syrup recipe. I added poppy seeds for the extra crunch. Guess what? the little cakes turned out moist and crumby. Sometimes it pays to stick to the recipe that you know works!!

The frosting was a wee-bit better as I went out to buy another tub of butter! The sugar however was not pure icing/confectionery-hence you can see that the consistency wasn't great. I did bring these little cakes to uni the next night (yes, postgrad student are quite hungry during our evening to night seminars) and they were gone. Someone even commented that they like their frosting soft or maybe they were trying to be encouraging... hmmm...

So here we go. Back to the drawing board for me. I still think it's the icing sugar. 1 cup of butter to 3 cups of pure icing sugar NOT icing mixture. What do you think? Let me know!