Lemony Dinosaurs

The results are in!

My husband took the cupcakes to work with him.  It's a small office, consisting of 3 women and 5 men, so I figure there should be enough diverse tastes.

First, the cake.  Rave reviews!  Yay!!!  Everyone loves the taste and the texture, which is leaning toward being almost like angel food cake, but not that thick and dense.

Second, they liked the decoration and one of the girls especially liked the spiky green grass.

I talked with the June fiancée last week and we've sort of decided on the remaining decorations for the cupcakes.  And, we added a flavor - lemon. 

This son always asks for lemon cake for his birthday and this year, of course, I made cupcakes - with the usual boxed version of lemon cake, but I made buttercream frosting and flavored it with lemon flavoring.  My hubby gets awful blisters in his mouth from citrus acid and I've learned to either use flavoring or make sure it's cooked and/or with a lot of milk product to cut the acid down. 

This son is such a kid at heart.  :)  I hope he never changes.  This is the one who loved Barney, and dinosaurs - the Stegosaurus, especially.  While the other one likes weird things like alligators and sharks in the bathtub (JOKE!!) this one likes goofy things.  Like stegosaurus bathtub stickers.  You get the idea.

I'm lucky enough to live reasonably close to Country Kitchen Sweetart that a couple weeks ago, hubby took me there to scout for what kinds of things are available and to pick up some cupcake wrappers.  We also picked up a catalog that we gave to the June fiancée.  She had looked through it and showed me what she liked as decorations.  At first, she was concerned that some weren't "wedding" enough but I told her that it's HER wedding.  If she wants blue brontosauruses  swinging from trees THAT is what she should have!  (Thankfully, she doesn't because there ain't NO WAY I could pull that one off!)

Lemon cupcake with dinosaur sprinkles

So, between the two of them it has been decided that there will be lemon cupcakes with lemon frosting and hard sugar dinosaurs as decoration.  I was kind of hoping they'd decide on the decoration I did on son's birthday cupcakes - colored sanding sugar and little dinosaur sprinkles because I really thought it was cute and pretty.  But they like the dinos, so dinos it will be!

Lemon cupcake with star sprinkles

Next, I have to find a really good lemon cake and frosting.   For the fun of baking, I prefer to try not to use cake mixes but time's running out so I might not have a choice. 

For today, though, I have some blueberries that never made it into my yogurt so I'm hunting either blueberry cake recipes or blueberry muffins.  I have a blueberry muffin recipe and I hate it.  I have a blueberry bread recipe and it's really good, but I want to try something different.