This has long* been a dream of mine!

*Maybe a year, year and a half?  Which is a lifetime on the internet, really.

Yesterday I wanted to make a bunch of cupcakes for the movable feast I promised to take to TV night (LOST, Dexter, and Battlestar Galactica - thus the need for a good deal of fluffy pink icing).  Pink lemonade seemed like an ideal spring mood-lifter, but the recipes I found on Bakespace didn't work out quite the way they should have.

In fact, there was so much sturm and drang around the making of the treat you see above that I didn't even get to taste test the final product.  I simply iced, decorated - I chose Pez because it's small and pretty - and boxed.   It wasn't until someone asked "Did you decorate these with Pez because they taste like Pez?" that I realized how clever I'd been.

(And not even then, really, because my reply was, "No, why?  Do they taste like Pez?")

Oh, but to my Pez-loving delight, they did.  They do.  And they are really easy:

Pez Cupcakes

(adapted from recipes found on Bakespace) 

Cupcakes:
1 cup + 2 tablespoons cake flour 1/2 tsp baking powder 1/4 tsp baking soda
Pinch salt
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 egg whites
1/3 cup thawed frozen Lemonade Concentrate
1/4 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. 

In a small bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In an electric mixer, whisk together sugar, oil, egg whites and lemonade concentrate. Alternately add in flour mixture and buttermilk, making three additions of flour mixture and two of milk.

Scoop batter into prepared pan. Bake in preheated oven for 20-25 minutes or until tops of cupcakes spring back when lightly touched. Let cool in pan on rack for 10 minutes. Remove from pan and let cool completely on rack. Top cooled cupcakes with frosting and Pez. 

Makes about 7 cupcakes.  I tripled the recipe, would probably quadruple to make the pink Pez buttercream.

Pink Pez Buttercream

1 1-pound box icing sugar
1 stick butter, softened
1/4 c. frozen lemonade concentrate
4 drops red food coloring

Stir food coloring to lemonade.  I did not have a full 1/4 cup of lemonade, so I added some milk to total 1/4 c. liquid.

In an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar together.  Add liquid slowly.  Mix until uniformly pink.

I was so proud of myself over these, that today I treated myself to an Emperor Palpatine Pez dispenser, so he can hover over the cute cupcakes and say, "You want this.  Don't you?"

I really wish I had time to do every project in Marie Claire Idees.  It didn't stop me from creating a Flickr group dedicated to just that, though…