These orange and lemon cupcakes are the perfect tiny pleasures to indulge by yourself or to share with a friend 🙂 This is the most basic cupcake recipe with the addition of some citrusy lemon and orange zest and juice!
We are soon going to shift from Romania to America and with just last 2 weeks left, every day is a chance to meet friends. Last Friday, one of my friends was coming for coffee in the evening and I thought I should make a simple cake for the evening.
My initial idea was to make a lime loaf cake but then I thought of making cupcakes so that she can easily take some with her. I made these on Thursday evening and I just couldn’t help myself from, first licking the whole bowl once I had filled in the batter and then enjoying two of these back to back with a mug of coffee as soon as they were out of the oven!
When Sikander got back home that evening, two more disappeared. And then two more of Friday morning during breakfast! In the evening, we were left with just 4 between the two of us and we totally celebrated our coffee and conversation with these delicious and aromatic lemon cupcakes. My purpose of her taking some with her was totally defeated :-p.
The recipe is very simple. I just added some citrus lemon and orange zest and juice to basic cupcakes recipe. In this one, I added eggs, but you can also use flax eggs as a vegan egg substitute. And use soy or coconut yogurt as a substitute for homemade yogurt.
Here’s a visual list of ingredients for the orange and lemon cupcakes:
I learned recently that a combination of orange and lemon in cake (or cupcake) is called St. Clement’s. I wonder what’s the story behind that. For now, I enjoyed the combination not just in eating but also while preparation! The aroma and the freshness of lemon and orange is just so beautiful in them. Even just zesting left my fingers smelling so wonderful. I used small clementines for the orange.
Variations to Orange and Lemon Cupcakes
The only flavor the cupcakes have is the zest and juice in the batter. As with most citrus recipes, you can easily substitute with other citrus fruits:
- Use only lemon or only orange
- Lime is a great alternative too
Orange and Lemon Cupcakes
Ingredients (1cup = 240ml; 1tbsp = 15ml; 1tsp = 5ml)
Wet ingredients
- ½ cup plain yogurt
- 6 tbsp butter melted
- 2 eggs room temperature
- zest of 1 lemon
- zest of 1 orange
- 2 tbsp lemon & orange juice
Dry Ingredients
- 1 cup flour
- ½ tsp baking soda
- pinch of salt
- 7 tbsp sugar
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 180ºC [360ºF | Gas Mark 4]
- Mix all wet ingredients together in a measuring jar.
- Sift the flour in a large bowl. Add in baking soda, salt, and sugar. Mix with your fingers.
- Make a well in the center and add the mixed wet ingredients into the bowl and fold the dry ingredients in. Beat together with a hand-held beater at medium speed for a couple of minutes.
- Line your muffin or cupcake pan with liners and fill till ¾ level.
- Bake for 15-20 minutes till the top is golden brown.
- Remove from oven and leave them to cool for a little while before removing from the pan.
Notes
- See variations in the blog post above.
- Optional Icing: Mix together ½ cup icing sugar with 2 tbsp lemon juice (or half and half of lemon and orange juice) to make icing thick enough to cover the tops and drizzle down a little. Or you can also spread some cream cheese frosting on top!
- Nutritional Information is an approximate value for 1 of 10 cupcakes.
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Could it be that the yoghurt part makes them really goey of some sort?? I was really looking forward to these,but after 20 minutes they still weren’t fully cooked.Tried for an additional 10 minutes,and still nothing.So yeah bummed,but I am gonna try again!
Dear, Mandy!!
I am so sorry that you had such an experience. Did you make them without yogurt? Did you use any substitute for the ½ cup yogurt in the recipe? If you want to try vegan cupcakes, try using this recipe of Orange cake and instead of pouring in a cake mould, use cupcake moulds. The baking time will reduce to 15-20 minutes instead of 45 mins for the cake.
Hope this helps…
Hi there, I was wondering whether you meant plain flour or self raising flour. The cupcakes look delish! Ruth
Hello Ruth,
I use plain flour.
Hope that helps,
ashima