Cupcake Monday

What better way to start out the week than with cupcakes? Each Monday I will be testing out various cupcake recipes. As you well know I love baking cupcakes and am ready to branch out into different versions. At the end of each recipe I will review and rate the recipe using my cupcake rating method (as seen above).
This week’s recipe is

Martha Stewart’s daunting Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

I saw these while perusing her website, watched the video and knew I wanted to make them.

A couple of things I came across while making these.

• I had to purchase a candy thermometer, lemon zester and citrus juicer as I did not have these on hand.
• Either our cheap Walmart zester sucked or zesting a lemon is a pain in the ass. It took Sir Sunderland a good 15 minutes to zest all 5 lemons needed for the recipe. Maybe next time we will use Sir Sunderland’s method of peeling the lemon then tossing it into our blender.
• The batter is thick. I asked Sir Sunderland to re-read the recipe numerous times to make sure I didn't add too much flour.
  
• The eggs needed to be room temperature? Weird.
• You make TONS of lemon curd and use about 1/8th of it for topping cupcakes. Anyone want some lemon curd?
• 7 minute frosting is indeed one giant LIE. It takes 7 minutes to mix your ingredients after boiling them for 15 minutes and whipping your egg whites.
  

These suckers are time consuming! It took about 2 hours to make the cupcakes and lemon curd and another 30 minutes to make the frosting. The frosting never turned into any usable form even after cooling it in the fridge and freezer.
On a rating of 1 to 4 cupcakes, I am giving it a 1. I would give it a zero, however the actual cupcake itself was pretty tasty, just not worth effort or money