Happy Birthday Mom! ~ Honey Lemon Lavender Cupcakes

It's my amazing, wonderful, beautiful Mom's birthday today!

Happy Birthday Mommy!!

{I'm wearing 4" heels people.  How is it my mom is 6' 2" and I'm 5' 8"?}

I really can't say enough about my mom.  She is such a strong and loving woman.  She's always been one of my best friends - through good and bad.  She's a phenomenal grandma.  And it makes me smile when I realize I did a little something for the boys that she used to do for me, but I don't even realize it until after the fact.  So, in honor of it being my mom's birthday and all, I wanted to share an amazing recipe I know she'll love.

Readers digest version of how this post came to be.  Every week I feature an amazing food picture on my blog's side bar for Food Porn Friday - have you noticed?  The cupcakes I'm sharing today were my first victim.  My friend Jaime - who is not into sweets at all - said these cupcakes sounded awesome and I should make them.  Well, Jamie's birthday was on May 14th and that was all the reason I needed to finally make these bad boys.  Jamie got her cupcake on, I baked with a new ingredient, and now I get to post the recipe in honor of my mom.  Triple threat.

Honey Lemon Lavender Cupcakes
From Hooray for Off Weekends

Ingredients:
Honey and Lavender Cupcakes
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon dried lavender flowers **
3/4 cups unsalted butter, softened
3 tablespoons honey
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Zest of one lemon
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Honey Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting
12 ounces cream cheese, softened
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
2 tablespoons honey
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Purple food coloring (optional)   {I mixed red & blue. I paid attention in 1st grade.}

Directions:
Cupcakes

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.  Line a muffin tin with 12 cupcake liners.
2. Put sugar and lavender into a food processor and pulse until well combined.
3. In a large bowl, beat together butter, lavender, and honey until pale yellow.  Beat in the eggs, one at a time.  Add vanilla and lemon zest; mix to combine.
4. In a medium bowl,combine flour and baking powder.  Add flour mixture to butter mixture in 2 additions.  Mix until dry ingredients are just incorporated.  Batter will be moist and thick - it should not be runny.  
5. Spoon batter into prepared muffin tin cups. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.  Remove from oven and cool completely.

Frosting

1. Place cream cheese, powdered sugar, and honey in a large bowl and beat until combined and a smooth base forms; scrape bowl sides as needed.
2. Add vanilla and lemon juice and mix until smooth.
3. Add food coloring and mix one more time.
4. Pipe the icing on to the cupcakes.  Garnish with lemon zest curls or dried lavender or yellow sanding sugar,if desired.

**Dani said she was able to find the dried lavender at Whole Foods.  I had no such luck.  I tried AJ's, Amazon, and Whole Foods.  Luckily the guy at Whole Foods took pity on me and gave me a card for Desert Sage Herbs - a local herbalist/aromatherapy shop.  They had dried lavender!! 

If you can't find dried lavender easily, skip the search.  Desert Sage Herbs ships!  The minimum purchase for  their herb selection is 1 ounce.  {You can imagine I have A LOT of leftover lavender, but I have plans.  Oh do I have plans for that lavender.} Desert Sage Herbs only charges the USPS shipping price, nothing extra or crazy like the $25 shipping cost I ran into from one vendor on Amazon.  If you're local in AZ, there is a $5 minimum purchase to run your card and they're closed on Sundays.

The frosting and cake combination for these cupcakes is really sensational.  I liked the cake by itself, and the frosting alone too.  I mean come on cream cheese frosting, easy sell!  But together.  Wow!  The lemon flavor is exponentially multiplied and all the flavors play off each other beautifully.