4th of July Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

Oh my GOOD-NESS.  I first made these cupcakes for my nieces and nephews because they have an amazing lemon tree in their front yard.   Every Thanksgiving, we do the key lime pies for Dad, of course, but because we had such a bountiful harvest of these perfect Rio Grande lemons last year, we decided to get creative.

What if, in addition to pies, we did a lemon meringue something or other?  Because we were inspired by the idea of owning a family bakery some day, we came up with the idea of a cupcake version of one of our family favorites. 

Just to give you an idea, we made 48 mini cupcakes but there was not a single crumb left 10 minutes after the last tray came out of the oven. No lie! DESTROYED.  So, I would say this is a great bet for parties or heck, just a bunch of hungry kids no matter how young or old they are.

But now that I live in the tropics, I also had an abundance of lemons from my own Meyer's lemon tree so we decided to make these again for our 4th of July celebration picnic by the beach! Once again, they went in the blink of an eye and only a trail of crumbs were left to tell the tale.

Cupcakes:
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup butter, room temperature
1 large egg, room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2/3 cup buttermilk
zest of a lemon

Bake at 350 for 25 minutes in a greased muffin pan.  We used mini muffin pans but any size muffin should work fine.

Icing Options:

You can use either a classic meringue or do what we did, we made our own TexMex Valley lemon curd because we had an abundance of lemons.  Bake the cupcakes first and either let cool or pipe lemon curd to the warm cupcakes. 

We never got that far... I put a spoon in a bowl of lemon curd on the table and turned my back for a minute. One of the kids dumped the cupcakes out right on the cabinet and another had a spoon of lemon curd in their mouth before I turned back around! So, forget about making them pretty when kids are around. None of that fanciness is required, just make sure there are plenty of spoons for the curd or there will be squeals and words exchanged over whoever has the lemon curd while the others are trying to wait for it to hit the table again.

Meringue:
3 large egg whites
1/4 teaspoon Bakewell Cream or cream of tartar
1/8 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons sugar

Beat egg whites and dry ingredients to stiff peaks.  Use a piping bag to pipe the meringue onto unbaked cupcakes. **Tent a piece of tin foil over the top if they appear to be getting too brown before the cupcakes are done.