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Cupcakes and muffins
Coconut & lemon cupcakes with lemon marmalade filling

Coconut & lemon cupcakes with lemon marmalade filling

Cupcakes and muffins

Let’s get metaphysical (sing along if you know the words, folks). I was in a metaphysics class (in case you’re wondering: yes, it is impossible to say that particular combination of words without sounding like an asshole) and we got into a debate about what constitutes a martini. The correct answer, as the professor so rightly explained, was gin, vermouth, and either an olive or a twist of lemon. That’s it. Now, to anyone who’s been fortunate enough to read this lovely blog should already know that what I just described is, in fact, a martini, and anything else is blasphemy on a par with executing the Pope in St. Peter’s Square and starting to worship his hat. But the reasoning she gave, that’s what gave me a little bit of the think-juice. She said this: If changing the garnish from an olive to a cocktail onion is enough to change the drink from a Martini to a Gibson, how could a Martini be anything but gin and vermouth? And she’s right. 100% right. Right enough to extrapolate it across the board: if changing one ingredient makes enough of a difference to change the name, then you’d damn well better believe each and every one of those ingredients matters. Granted, that flies in the face of all the times I’ve uttered an emphatic ‘meh’ to my measuring spoons and instead elected to more or less fling fistfuls of vanilla paste at whatever happens to be going into my oven at the time. But the point remains the same. Ingredients matter, and they make the biggest difference when they’re distilled down to their purest form. Keep it pure, keep the ingredients where they belong, and that’s where flavor happens. That’s why this week we’re going to cook the everloving shit out of a bunch of lemons and shove it inside a lemon cupcake. And we’re gonna make coconut frosting and top it with more coconut. Because we’re purists; right?