What do you do with left-over lemon curd?

After gaining several empathy pounds, in a record amount of time, from just baking a cake that had 11 1/2 cups of butter and 10 3/4 cups of sugar (oh God, I can't believe I ate two pieces), I realized with some dismay that when I looked in the fridge, there was still a left-over jar of Meyer lemon curd in there, staring back at me.

I think I have related my feelings about wasting food here before, and as something that makes me feel incredibly guilty, I decided that the lemon curd absolutely had to be used up. And soon, before it went bad. Real bad. And came out of the fridge to attach itself in it's buttery silkiness to my rear end while I was sleeping. ( Don't worry, I whisked that cake away to the 'office' -the lab, remember I'm a scientist - the morning after I made it so that we wouldn't even be tempted to eat more of it).

But, what to do with leftover lemon curd? Dipping bread or cookies or scones in it wasn't an option...there was far too much of it...it was only good for 5 days according to the recipe, and it had already been four. Then I got an idea from a blog I've just recently discovered...Culinary in the Desert. Joe makes delicious goodies and new recipes every day (he's got organization I can only dream about!). One of these included a yummy looking lemon coconut bread about a week ago. But what's better than coconut bread dipped in lemon curd? Coconut cupcakes filled with Meyer lemon curd! And how about topped with cream cheese frosting?

In my searches on the Internet, I found inspiration for almost exactly this on a new blog! Cupcake Bakeshop by Chockylit has a cupcake of every kind! And they're beautiful! Following suite, but not the recipe available (I wanted coconut cupcakes), the end result was easy, and so far, there haven't been any complaints from Loving Boyfriend...only: "I'm going to go have another cupcake."


The cupcakes themselves are awesome. I used this coconut cake recipe from epicurious.com, and they were perfect. I added a bit of lemon zest just to help tie things together, and used only a cup of coconut. They were tender and light (in texture, not calories, silly!), with just a hint of lemon, and literally melt in your mouth (in the best way possible). I even took some of the extra cake batter and turned it into a coconut mini-loaf without the frosting (although I love to play with frosting, I actually prefer to eat cakes that don't have it!).

The cream cheese frosting was a Cooking Light recipe, you can find here. I left out the coconut, because I wanted smooth frosting. I used a large round tip from my very cool cake decorating kit that Loving Boyfriend gave me for Christmas to pipe on the frosting after thinning it every so slightly with a bit of light corn syrup. I tried Chockylit's suggestion for cutting the top off into a cone to put the lemon curd inside, but I had much more success with how the cupcakes looked in the end when I just piped the curd into the center of the cupcake through the top, then covered it up with the frosting. Taking a bow to chockylit, I added a bit of Meyer lemon zest to garnish the top. Viola! No wasted lemon curd, and I haven't had to eat more than one (of course, we might have to put L.B. on a diet soon...)!