Key Lime Pie Cupcakes

These turned out to be blue ribbon cupcakes! I made them for my son's wedding rehearsal dinner. There are four parts to them: graham cracker crust, cake, lime curd, and whipped cream. A bit more involved than a traditional cupcake, but well worth it. Here is a link to the recipe onlime, I mean, online: Key Lime Pie Cupcake Recipe on Tracey's Culinary Adventures

Things I would change about the way I decorated them:

• I sprinkled lime zest on top of the whipped cream topping. It was a bit much, because if you got a large amount in a mouthful – overbearing and very tart. I wouldn’t top with lime zest again. But I do like the idea of lime-green colored traditional sprinkles, as a hint to what the flavors are.

• The frosting is basically a whipped cream. Next time I would experiment with folding something more substantial into it, like a bit of whipped cream cheese in a small amount, so it would stand up a little taller on top of the cake. It worked as called for, however.

Things I would change about the cupcakes themselves:

• Absolutely nothing! All elements of the crust, cake and curd were excellent. The cake was dense and succulent, the curd was a really nice balance between tart and sweet, and the graham cracker crust was a very tasty surprise at the bottom of a delicious bite.

These are a notch above a traditional cupcake, and though they may look simple on the outside, they sure do please the crowd when they peel back the wrapper, revealing the crust, and bite into the cake, revealing the hidden lime curd.

Side note: I was practically giddy about my pink boxes from the bakery department of a local grocery store. The restaurant where the dinner was held had a rule, as I'm sure they all do, that any dessert I brought in had to be from a commercial bakery. So these pink boxes were my way of cheating to make them look professional. But they did make me feel like a 'real' baker as I boxed them all up.