Lemon & Poppy Seed Cupcakes

At the moment, as you might be able to tell, I'm trying to get creative and concoct some of my own cake recipes. After compiling a long list of random ideas, I made these lemon and poppy seed cupcakes. In this recipe, I used quite a lot of poppy seeds, but if you wanted to tone it down a bit anything from 25g to 50g would be fine. The recipe makes about 12 cupcakes.

Ingredients:

• 100g margarine
• 100g caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 125g self raising flour
• 40ml lemon juice (the juice of approx. 2 lemons)
• 3 drops of lemon flavouring
• 50g of poppy seeds (plus around 10g extra for decoration)
• A pinch of salt
• 200g lemon curd

Pre-heat the oven to 180ºC

Cream the margarine and the sugar until pale and fluffy, then add the eggs and beat.

Add the salt then sift in the flour and mix together. 

Mix in the lemon flavouring and lemon juice before adding the poppy seeds.

Separate the mixture between the 12 cases, then put in the oven to bake for around 20 minutes.

When the cakes are baked and cooled, core the cakes and fill with a spoonful of lemon curd.

For the icing I used 75g margarine, 250g icing sugar, 3 large teaspoons of lemon curd and 3 drops of lemon flavouring. 

After piping on the icing, sprinkle some poppy seeds on top for decoration.

 Happy baking!