Lightning Lemon Cupcakes! Smart + Simple DIY Gifts
Ready for a new fun birthday cake idea? These cupcakes are a great project for kids:
- Easy enough for a tween
- No tricky fluffy frosting–frosting is drippy and seeps into the cake
- Personalize your cupcake toppers with the birthday kid’s name or photo. (We used the multichoice labels to get a variety of colors and icons on a single sheet of labels!)
Materials and tools:
-Muffin tins
-Wooden stir sticks
-Cupcake papers or silicone molds
-3-4 sheets of festive, personalized round labels (pick your colors, words, fonts and icons with the Elements Watermark style)
Lightning Lemon Cupcakes!
Author:
Ingredients
- 1 package yellow cake, along with ingredients to make it
- 1 package lemon-flavored Jello mix
- Grated rind of one lemon
- Juice of two lemons
- 1 ½ cups powdered sugar
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 F. Line 24 muffin cups with cupcake papers or silicone molds.
- Combine the cake mix, the ingredients required for the cake mix, and the gelatin mix in a large bowl. Blend at medium speed for 2 minutes or whisk by hand for 5 minutes.
- Pour the mixture evenly into the molds.
- Bake for 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a cupcake comes out clean.
- While the cupcakes are baking, combine the lemon juice, lemon rind and powdered sugar.
- Once the cupcakes are done, remove them from the oven and allow them to cool for several minutes. Then puncture the top of each cupcake several times with a fork.
- Use a spoon or a silicone brush to spread the lemon juice mixture over the tops of the cake. This thin frosting will soak into the cake and make it more moist and more lemony!
Make the cupcake toppers:
- Place one label sticky side up, with bottom end closest to you on a clean work surface.
- Press a shortened stir stick onto the sticky side of the label so that a length of about 2 inches protrudes from the bottom of the label and the broken end lies roughly at the middle of the label.
- Place a label sticky side down, with the bottom end closes to you, right on top of the first label, sandwiching the stir stick.
- Repeat this process for the rest of your labels, always using the same size label for front and back on each stir stick.
Present your cupcakes:
- Once your cupcakes are thoroughly cool you can store them loosely covered up to two days.
- Place 1-2 cupcake toppers on each cupcake before presenting them to guests or the birthday kid.
- Cupcake toppers and candles don’t mix! Remove any toppers from cupcakes that will have a lit candle.
Auntie Angie is a part-time blogger and a full-time creator and crafter. She adores sticky things in tubs and bottles, but regrets sticky things on doorknobs and pencils. At Evermine, Angie shares projects inspired by her nieces and nephews that spark joy, imagination, and generosity.