Honey Cupcakes with Honey Cream Cheese Frosting – a delicious cupcake recipe, made from scratch, with local wild flower honey. Created by our contributor, Lauren Kapeluck of EllenJay Events.
Hello friends. It’s Lauren from EllenJay Events. I want to start off first by thanking Carrie for asking me to be a part of her amazingly gorgeous and always inspiring cake blog! I am honored to be a new contributor on The Cake Blog and look forward to sharing many great cupcake recipes and photos with you monthly! Today I am sharing my first cupcake creation to kick off summer, Honey Cupcakes with Honey Cream Cheese Frosting!
The star ingredient is fresh local honey that I picked up at our local farmer’s market a few weeks ago. While my husband and I were scoping out all the vendors we were quickly persuaded to sample some fresh honey. After one taste of a sweet wild flower honey I was sold and quickly purchased a mason jar full! Honey is an ingredient I always keep on hand (usually in the shape of the honey bear) to add some sweetness to smoothies, corn bread, a bowl of oatmeal, homemade granola bars or even dog biscuits for my black lab. Everything tastes better with a little honey right? All it took was one spoonful of honey and I was inspired to create a honey cupcake that I hope you are going to love!
HOW TO MAKE HONEY CUPCAKES WITH HONEY CREAM CHEESE FROSTING
Before we jump right to the recipe, I wanted to share with you some basic tools I use all the time when making cupcakes. I find that using a standard size ice cream scoop with a release mechanism is very helpful when filling the cupcake liners and making uniform sized cupcakes. I picked up my scoop at a grocery store a few years ago for just a few dollars and it is one of my absolute favorite kitchen gadgets! When it comes time to decorating cupcakes I absolutely love using a large round piping tip to create a tall swirly design like on these cupcakes! Don’t have a piping tip, just scoop your icing into a large zip lock bag, snip off one bottom corner and start swirling away!
Just looking at these cupcakes makes me happy! These little cakes are extra special because you get a double pop of honey in both the cake and frosting! Add some sugar sprinkles on top and you’ve got a vibrant sweet that is perfect for those bright summery days! Honey Cupcakes would be the perfect addition to a summer picnic or family reunion. You could even add some fresh lemon juice or zest for an extra punch of flavor! Don’t let summer pass you by without giving this recipe a try!
Honey Cupcakes with Honey Cream Cheese Frosting
A delicious cupcake recipe, made from scratch, with local wild flower honey.
- Yield: 12 cupcakes
Ingredients
For the Honey Cupcakes:
- ½ cup unsalted butter, room temperature
- ¾ cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ½ cup buttermilk
- ¼ cup honey
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
For the Honey Cream Cheese Frosting:
- ¾ cup unsalted butter, room temperature
- 4 oz cream cheese, softened
- 3 cups confectioners’ sugar
- 3 tablespoons honey
- yellow food coloring (optional)
- yellow sugar sprinkles
Instructions
Make the Honey Cupcakes:
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees and line a 12 cup muffin pan with cupcake liners.
- In medium bowl mix together dry ingredients: flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.
- In small bowl mix together wet ingredients: buttermilk, honey and vanilla. Set aside.
- In bowl of stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat butter and sugar on medium speed until combined.
- Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping down sides of bowl as needed.
- Gradually add the dry and wet ingredients, alternating starting and ending with dry ingredients and mix until combined.
- Using ice cream scoop fill cupcake liners about 2/3 full.
- Bake for 18-20 minutes, until toothpick inserted into cupcake comes out clean.
- Let cupcakes cool in pans for 5 minutes, then remove to wire rack to finish cooling.
Make the Honey Cream Cheese Frosting
- In bowl of stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat butter and cream cheese until combined.
- Gradually add confectioners’ sugar and continue to mixing scraping down sides of bowl as needed.
- Mix in honey.
- If desired, add a few drops of yellow food coloring to slightly tint the icing.
- Place the icing in a piping bag fitted with a round decorating tip and swirl the frosting on top of the cooled cupcake, going in a circular motion.
- Top with yellow sugar sprinkles.
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY:
Honey Butter Cake
Lemon Honey Apricot Cake
Dark Chocolate Honeycomb Cake
Golden Honeycomb Cake
Honeycomb and Gilded Bee Cake
Could we have metric measurements as well please
Here is a handy conversion calculator for you! Hope it helps!
https://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/cooking
Wonderful cupcake idea with honey. Just love it, can’t wait to try at home. Thanks for sharing!
These were amazing the first time I made them, but has anyone tried making them without the sugar, and maybe upping the honey? I want to make these for my friend’s baby shower, and she can’t have sugar!
My friend has hives that produce wildflower honey and I was dying to bake with it and did so with your recipe today I am so pleased. I love them. Can not wait to serve them later tonight. I used black liners for the cupcakes and they look beautiful. Thanks for what will now be one of my favorite recipes.
This recipe is a keeper! I’ve made it over and over again and always get rave reviews. Thank you!
★★★★★
Note sure what I did wrong but mine came out a little dense. The frosting did come out great though. Ty
I’d like to try baking these for a friend who is allergic to grain sugars. If I alter the recipe to just use honey instead of the 3/4 cup of sugar for the cupcakes and 3 cups for the frosting how would I go about that? I’ve heard the ratio to swap honey for sugar is ~ 1 to 1 and to add an extra 2 tbsp of the primary dry ingredient to balance out the wetness of the honey but I haven’t experimented with cooking with honey before to know if that works. Does anyone with more experience have suggestions?
I made this recipe into mini cupcakes and baked them less. The cake has a great, light honey taste and is very fluffy. I personally don’t really like cream cheese frosting much, but the honey balanced it out perfectly! This was a great recipe!
★★★★★
I did a trial run of these cupcakes last night and I just have to say YUM! I did use C&H brand honey granules instead of regular granulated sugar. I had them in my pantry and wanted to see how it would turn out. I also used honey I purchased at a local farm stand. The cupcakes were still absolutely amazing, so fresh-tasting and so moist. I’ll be frosting with a honey Swiss Meringue Buttercream. Thanks for a fantastic recipe!
★★★★★
So delicious. My family couldn’t get enough of them!
★★★★★
Did you use a wet or dry measuring cup for the honey?
Love it! Would this recipe work as a cake as well? I’m not sure if I would need to double the batter to make a 3 layered cake using 8 inch pans and if the time would adjust.
So, this is my third or fourth time making this recipe. I have decided to make it for my wedding cake. I love this recipe. I almost always add more honey into the batter before I bake it because it just gives it more umpf. Do you have any suggestions on how to make it as a cake instead of cupcakes? I know it wouldn’t be too difficult, it will just take longer to cook. Thank you for another amazing recipe.
★★★★★
Thanks for the recipe, local honey is the only way to go. Question for you, have you tried these with cake flour? I want to make a batch with cake flour but I wanted to see if you had tried this yet. Sometimes it can really mess up a batter when you change flours so I thought I’d check before I tested it out.
Thanks again.
Baked these a few days ago. While the flavor was good, it was dense and didn’t fully rise to the top of the liner as shown. Followed the directions to a T. Checked my baking powder to make sure it was fresh and that was not the problem.
★★★