fancy springtime cupcakes

With all the procrastinating for me to do this time of the year, I have been a mad baking fiend! I made these on a whim last night trying to use up leftover buttermilk:
These are (deep breath) vanilla buttermilk cupcakes with cream-cheese-pomegranate-honey frosting topped with home-candied violets!

I was inspired by these cupcakes, got the recipe for the cupcakes here and came up with the rest on my own. Here's the (modified) recipe (again this is not my own recipe, but I changed a few things, such as omitting almond extract):

Vanilla Buttermilk Cupcakes
1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
¼ cup butter, room temperature
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350F. Line muffin tin
In a medium bowl, stir together flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.
In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar together until it looks creamy. Beat in the egg and the vanilla and almond extracts until mixture is smooth.
Add half of the flour mixture to the butter mixture and stir until almost combined. Add buttermilk and stir, again, until almost combined. Add the rest of the flour and stir until all ingredients are mixed in.
Divide batter evenly into muffin cups.
Bake for 20-30 minutes at 350F, until a toothpick inserted into the center of a cupcake comes out clean.
Let cupcakes cool for 10 minutes and then remove from the muffin pan. Cool completely before frosting.

Makes 12 cupcakes, or about 36 mini cupcakes

Frosting:

Mix together 2 parts homemade or store-bought cream cheese frosting and 3 parts jam of your choice (we used a pomegranate-honey jam that a neighbor in California makes).

Violets:

Wash violets and allow to dry thoroughly. Lightly beat one egg white with a little water. Dip each violet in egg white and then roll in granulated sugar, and set on wax paper to dry.

We also made our own aluminum muffin cups, as we didn't realize until after we had bought regular-sized ones that we owned only a mini-muffin tin. We just cut circles out of aluminum foil by drawing around a coffee mug with an X-acto knife. We've decided we're never buying muffin liners again. :)

Well, still just working on one thing at a time, but despite these baking sprees, I am actually getting schoolwork done. Done this weekend, hopefully!