Dragonfly Cupcakes - Lemon Raspberry

Can't witty, I has teh dumb.

My mom requested these for a group she's going to, so I did my best. They're a lemon cupcake, filled with raspberry jam, decorated with butter-cream, colour spray and fondant. They take a bit of work, let me warn you.

Lemon Cupcakes

• 3 cups self-rising flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 2 cups white sugar
• 4 eggs, at room temperature
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons lemon zest
• 1 cup whole milk, divided
• 2 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, divided

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Line 30 cupcake pan cups with paper liners.
Sift the self-rising flour and salt together in a bowl. In another bowl, beat the unsalted butter and sugar with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating each egg until incorporated before adding the next. Mix in the vanilla extract and lemon zest.
Gently beat the flour mixture into the butter mixture, one third at a time, alternating with half the milk and half the lemon juice after each of the first 2 additions of flour. Beat until just combined; do not over mix.
Fill the prepared cupcake liners with batter 3/4 full, and bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 17 minutes. Let the cupcakes cool in the pans for about 10 minutes before removing them to finish cooling on a rack.

Note: I didn't have self-rising flour, so I used 3 tsp of baking powder along with the flour.

After the cupcakes cooled, I just took the wide end of a chopstick to poke a hole through the top of each one, about halfway down, and then put my jam in a piping bag and piped it in.

Then I made butter-cream, I used a couple tablespoons of lemon juice in place of the vanilla and some of the milk.

Dragonflies are as follows:

Roll out white fondant and use a small heart shaped cookie cutter, cut in half up and down for the wings. The body I just rolled out with my hands, thinner on one end, and the head is just a ball - all dyed black.

The antennae on mine are just a thin thread covered wire, but you could play around with that - try rice noodles, whatever.

Voila.