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Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Pink Lemonade Cupcakes, found over at Your Home Based Mom. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post.  

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was my choice, and I found it by Googling around for Paula Deen’s pink lemonade buttercream frosting, after one of you commenters mentioned the idea in a comment. I’d point y’all to it and thank the commenter, but I’ll be damned if I can remember who it was. (Okay, I just went and searched. It was Melanie. Take a bow, Melanie!)

A doctored-up cake mix and pink lemonade frosting. You KNOW I was on board for that!

Your cake ingredients:

White cake mix, the things you need to make the cake according to the directions on the box (in this case, vegetable oil and eggs – water was required, too, but I didn’t bother to take a picture of that. If you don’t know what water is, you’ve got bigger problems than we can help with.), lemon zest, pink lemonade mix, and Bacardi Rum vanilla.

Seriously. Who the fuck are they trying to kid? Eating raw cake batter is your reward for making a cake! Kiss my ass, Betty Crocker (Nance, add them to the list of companies that will never sponsor us now!)

Mix the cake, toss in lemon zest (I used fresh lemon zest because I’m a fancy bitch like that. You could probably use the dried stuff you can buy in the store if you are not so fancy as me.), vanilla, powdered drink mix. (By the way, that Country Time Pink Lemonade was the ONLY kind of pink lemonade that wasn’t using artificial sweeteners, which is why I bought that huge-ass container when I only needed a little of the powder.)

This, right here, is the point where I decided to deviate from the recipe. I was pouring batter into the cupcake liners that lined the cups of my muffin tin, and I remembered how much I REALLY FUCKING HATE peeling those liners off the cupcakes, and so I decided “Oh, to hell with this shit. I’m making a cake instead.”

So I greased my 9×13 cake pan, dumped in the batter, and stuck it in the oven.

I AM SUCH A REBEL.

Uh oh.

This is what a cake pan with raw batter in it looks like. In case you were wondering.

And the cake, done. Well, probably a little overdone.

I let the cake cool for a few hours, and then made the frosting. I should add here that I made this cake on the day that we had guys tromping in and out of the house all day long, replacing our air conditioning unit thingy. The thing I hate about having work done in the house is that I feel like I can’t DO anything in case they need a question answered (they didn’t need ANY questions answered), so I was very distracted. And yet, I took the following super-gorgeous and professional-looking picture of the frosting ingredients. Try not to feel too bad about your own picture-taking abilities.

Thawed frozen lemonade concentrate, powdered sugar, softened butter, Bacardi Rum vanilla.

Beat your butter ’til it’s creamy.

Add your powdered sugar, 1/2 cup at a time until you get annoyed and just throw the rest of it in there and sugar goes everywhere.

Add vanilla and thawed pink lemonade concentrate until it’s the consistency you want.

Frost your cake.

What you cannot tell from this picture is that the frosting was a very pretty, very light pink.

And the verdict? Fred thought it was AWEsome. He thought it was so awesome that at the end of the weekend, instead of feeding the leftovers to the chickens, like we usually do, he wrapped it in tin foil and stuck it in the freezer. Can you DO that with cake, frosted with buttercream frosting? Hell if I know; I guess we’ll find out next weekend.

I, on the other hand, was pretty meh about it. I don’t think it was the fault of the recipe, I think I just wasn’t in the mood for cake and buttercream frosting. (I know, right? CAN there be such a thing as not being in the mood for cake and buttercream frosting?! Apparently so.)

At this point, I have no plans to make it again unless Fred specifically requests it.

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Nance’s take: 

This is Rick and Robyn in a popular cupcake shop back in 2008. Please note the serious cheesin’ that happens with these two when there are cameras present. Good Lord.  Also, the amount of freaking cupcakes that were purchased that day!

I love cupcakes, but I stick with white, chocolate or yellow. Don’t be messing around and adding shit. I might break down and have a red velvet one, but I usually always regret it. On the day this photo was taken I distinctly remember having a couple  margarita flavored cupcakes (ew) in the box. And I remember Robyn liking them. What a weirdo.

So I wasn’t surprised when she decided to go pink lemonade on me with this recipe, but I did roll my eyes really hard. I grumbled and bitched about how awful it was going to taste and put everything about making them off until the last minute.  Maybe we should just try to find a recipe for the most perfect vanilla cupcake, eh?

Shirley was bound and determined to help me get these damn cupcakes done and I’m pretty sure that it was just so she wouldn’t have to listen to me bitch about it anymore. I was howling when I found out that my 72-year-old mom had no idea what lemon zest was. Yes, this is my mother and the woman who was supposed to have taught me how to cook. To say she was having difficulty is an understatement and I sure did hold my breath when she grabbed that paring knife to get the zest off that micro-planer. Especially when she dropped it and almost impaled poor Sadie. The very worst part? I’m pretty sure we have used lemon zest in other recipes on here. Is my mother having a moment?

My first action shot of the entry!  Whee!

Cake batter with pink lemonade mix and lemon zest (which sorta kinda looks like cumin because I am that much of a great photographer).  Who has an expensive camera and still doesn’t know how to use it?

After I mixed it up I wasn’t impressed with how it looked so I decided to add some gel food coloring. Pretty, huh?

Blahblahblah, right? I decided to switch things up after I made the first round of cupcakes so I added blueberries (tossed in flour) to the last of the cupcake batter before I tossed it in the oven. Everybody knows that blueberries and lemon go great together. Right, Phaedra?

This is me making the frosting and forgetting to take a picture until the last minute. Ugh!

I decided to use a plastic storage bag instead of a pastry bag so I could just throw it away when I was done.

Big Mistake.  After this happened I remembered that I tried this before and the plastic storage bag didn’t hold up. I’m a clumsy ox on a good day so you can just imagine the freaking mess I had going on here.  I’m also a stupid ox for doing this before and not learning my lesson.

Man down!

Of course it had to have been one that was already frosted.

I tried to make my cupcakes as pretty as the ones that lady had on her page, but get real. It’s a cupcake and I couldn’t be bothered because it felt too much like crafting to me.

The most shocking thing? Everybody liked these cupcakes! They liked the normal ones and they liked the ones that I put blueberries in. The recipe is definitely a winner in this house. Do I think I’ll make them again? Maybe someday if I am completely over normal cupcakes. But I just don’t know if it’s worth the hassle of tracking down pink lemonade mix and lemonade concentrate. Eh, I guess I’m on the fence about it.  They’re good.  Not great.  I would probably just stick with chocolate, white or yellow.

Besides, look what it did to poor Felina!