Gluten Free Key Lime Cupcakes

This past couple weeks have been quite daunting for me. I've been working quite a bit, so I sadly haven't had much chance to post recipes or cook. However, I have quite a few uber awesome recipes coming up, so I'm making up for it with high quality.

Now there are a lot of components to this dessert for sure, but all the hard work is worth the delicious pay off.

Here's a really zesty recipe that transforms key lime pie into a cake. It uses a gluten free graham cracker crust, homemade key lime curd, the cake recipe from my Tiramisu Cake, and a mascarpone cheese frosting. I hope you enjoy!

For the key lime curd, I use the following recipe from Allrecipes, "Fresh Lime Curd", and I substitute the lime juice with key lime juice. For this recipe, be sure to carefully temper your eggs, or else you'll end up with scrambled eggs in your curd.

Serves: 18 cupcakes
Prep Time: 35 minutes total

• 5 minutes for the crust, 
• 10 minutes for the cake, 
• 10 minutes for the curd, 
• 10 minutes for the frosting

Cook Time: 25 minutes for the cake, 30 minutes for the curd

Ingredients:
Crust
1 1/2 cup gluten free graham cracker crumbs
6 tbsp butter
1/4 cup sugar

Cake
227g eggs (4-5 large eggs)
227g white sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp baking powder
85g white rice flour
57g potato starch
28g tapioca starch
28g almond flour
28g brown rice flour
227g melted butter

Frosting
5 egg yolks
1 cup sugar
1 cup mascarpone
1 1/2 cup heavy cream


Steps
Preheat the oven to 350F.


Prepare the Allrecipes version of Fresh Lime Curd. Click here for the link. Like I said before, be sure to replace the lime juice with the key lime juice, and be sure to carefully temper your eggs. At first the curd will look like this:

At the end after cooking, the curd will go from a grey-tan color to a bold golden green:

Refrigerate the curd while preparing the rest of the components. 


Crust
Line cupcake tins with paper cups. In a small bowl, melt all the butter. Combine the crust ingredients, and then spoon crust into the bottom of each cup. Spread the crust into even layers.

Cake
In a small bowl, combine all the flours.

Fill a shallow dish with warm water, and place an empty medium-sized mixing bowl into the dish. Add the eggs, sugar, lemon, and vanilla, beat for about a minute. Remove the eggs from the water and beat them until they have tripled in volume, which took me about 5 minutes.

Gradually fold the flour into the batter until fully combined. Pour the batter into the cupcake tines, and bake for 25 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.


Place the cupcakes onto a cooling rack and let them cool completely.


Frosting


To make the frosting, start a double boiler, and add the egg yolks and sugar. Cook over high heat until the sugar is dissolved, stirring constantly. Once sugar has dissolved, reduce to low heat and continuously whisk for 10 minutes. After the 10 minutes, remove the custard from the heat and whisk until it has thickened a bit, approximately 1 minute. Fold in the mascarpone until combined. Whip the cream in a chilled bowl until peaks form, and gently fold into the custard until well combined. Refrigerate the frosting until you are ready to frost.

Assembly


Using a circular piping tip, or a knife, cut holes into the middles of the cakes. 


Fill a Ziploc bag with the curd, and then cut off the tip to form a piping bag. Pipe the middle of the cakes with the curd.


Then frost the top of each cupcake with the frosting. Top the cupcakes with lime zest for garnish.

I hope you enjoy this recipe! Hope everyone has a good week!