Taste of (sour) sunshine

I am on a roll with the posts ladies.

J has really long shifts. I mean 13 hour long shifts, and to distract myself I've been cooking and baking a whole lot more lately. Along with that comes the gift of food to others (as in the lentil soup from the previous post), but I've found that when its a sweet something gift, I really enjoy making it pretty for the eyes. I mean, I just spent a couple hours making these darn cakes, why not take the extra 5 minutes to make it look appealing? It makes people feel special, and although I wont say I do it all the time (and honestly, people are grateful no matter what that cake/those cookies/etc look like), I like packaging the whole thing up. Its like I'm saying, hey you, I love you and I made you something delicious and wanted it to look as pretty as I could just for you! So why not?

With the first real lasting warmth of spring in the air, of course my thoughts turn the deliciousness that is summer baking, and that for me always involves lemon. Dear God, I could write poetry to that oval-ish yellow ball of goodness and happiness and sunshine. I put that sh*t in everything. And I put alot of it in these little cakes. The smell, colour, taste made me happy and put me in mind of sweet sweet summer. Here is the recipe (warning, its not a sweet desert, despite the amount of sugar in it, its definitely more on the sour side):

Lemon raspberry strawberry cakes with lemon glaze

Cake ingredient

• 4 cups of flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• zest of one lemon

Mix those together, set aside

• 1 cup butter
• 1 1/4 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup brown sugar

Cream those together, then add

• 3 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• lemon juice from that zested lemon

Slowly alternate between adding the flour mixture and

• 1 cup plain Greek yogurt

It will make a thick batter. Incorporate by hand 

• 2 cups of berries (I used raspberries and chopped strawberries, feel free to use whatever combo you want/have on hand)

Spoon into muffin tins or mini loaf tins (it made 14 cupcakes and 6 mini loaves for me), bake at 325. The cupcakes took 40 mns, and the loaves 50, top was golden. They are just so moist and delicious and lemony without the glaze, but I added it since it looks cooler lol!

Glaze ingredients

• 3/4 cup icing sugar
• juice and zest of 1/2 lemon
• a tsp of milk

Just mix all that in a bowl and drizzle over completely cooled cakes. I got the original recipe from Pintrest, just changed a couple things.

Drizzzzzzzlllleeeeee dat glaaaaaze

 So to wrap it up, I just used wax paper and wrapped two mini loaves or 4 cupcakes to a package. Taped it like it was a gift, then stuffed it gently in a ziplock. I had been using paint swatches for another craft project so I had a few extra in hand, I cut out a yellow shade that was actually called pale lemon (made me chuckle), cut the words off, wrote a cute little message, and affixed it with a felt heart sticker I had from scrapbooking. Took two minutes. <3

That +5 roll card is a DND joke... I'm a nerd and proud of it :)