I may have a slight lychee fetish. I did, after all, do two consecutive weeks of lychee cocktails. That sweet, tropical flavor is so irresistible. I wish I could bathe in lychee juice. Well, maybe not. That would get sticky. I learned that the hard way.
So I decided to make some lychee cupcakes last weekend for Memorial Day. Lychee doesn’t particularly scream “remembering the men and women who died in war,” but you know, I like lychee. And cupcakes. I found the cupcake recipe here. I just made cupcakes instead of a cake.
Lychee Cupcakes
3/4 cup butter (that’s one and a half sticks)
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 14-ounce can lychees (drain the fruit, save the syrup)
First, I chopped up the lychee fruit, leaving the syrup aside, and I took about a third of the flour and coated the lychee pieces so that they wouldn’t sink the bottom of the cupcakes.
Then I creamed together the butter and sugar, added the eggs and vanilla extract, and then added the dry ingredients, along with the lychee pieces from above. I also added 7 tablespoons of the lychee syrup into the batter.
And then the batter goes into some cupcake liners, as you might expect for a cupcake recipe.
After 20 minutes at 350F, they are done.
The cupcakes were very fragrant straight out of the oven. It smelled like lychee in my kitchen. Heavenly.
Some people might say that a cupcake without frosting is just a muffin. I think they’re wrong. But still, I wanted frosting. So I made up a recipe.
Lychee Frosting
1 stick butter
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup lychee syrup
1 tablespoon Soho lychee liqueur
I whipped the ingredients together with a hand mixer for the frosting.
Then I spread the frosting on the cupcakes. As you can see, the results were less than desirable.
I think I added too much liquid, which caused the frosting to have this odd texture. I thought they tasted good. The cupcakes and frosting both had a strong lychee flavor. I just need to decrease the amount of liquid in the frosting next time.
It’s a difficult thing to get the right frosting texture without having it overwhelmed by powdered sugar. The only way I could get lychee flavor into the frosting was with lychee syrup and lychee liqueur, which are obviously both liquid. But more liquid ruins the consistency of the frosting. If I had some lychee powder, that would have solved the texture problem. Well, maybe next time…