Lemon Cupcakes with Raspberry Filling

I love to bake. But I also have the world's shortest attention span and tend to choose recipes where I can take shortcuts. So I'm not exactly baking everything from scratch... but if the end result tastes great, who needs to know?

Take these lemon cupcakes for example. You could certainly bake them from scratch and whip up some homemade frosting. Or you could stop by the supermarket, grab your favorite lemon flavored cake mix and a container of ready-made frosting, and have equally-delicious cupcakes in approximately 30 minutes.

The problem is, I always feel guilty when I take the completely easy way out. So I like to add my own homemade touch to my shortcut recipes. So for these lemon cupcakes, I added some delicious raspberry filling.

What You'll Need:
1 package (16oz) frozed raspberries packed in sugar -- thawed completely
1/3 cup granulated sugar
3 tbsp corn starch
1 tsp fresh lemon juice

Cook raspberries, sugar, corn starch and lemon juice in a saucepan over medium heat until mixture thickens. Once cool, spoon into a piping bag fitted with a tip (I like to use #230 Round Tip).

Stick tip into top middle of cupcake and fill until raspberries are barely visible on top of cupcake. Finish filling rest of cupcakes and frost. Some of the raspberry filling will blend in with the frosting (which I happen to love!) but if you don't want raspberries in your frosting, use less filling.

You can also add fancy little fondant decorations like I did. And by fancy, I mean I bought the pre-colored stuff and used a cookie cutter.

Enjoy!
xoxo,
L