Trip To Bountiful – Vanilla Cupcakes with Pomelo Buttercream and Pink Grapefruit Curd Filling

Every time I visit California, it reminds me of how spoiled I was when I lived there from the abundance and varieties of produce.

I mentioned previously my recent stay with my friend Trudi in Temecula, California. Her wonderful kitchen was the scene of my latest macaron disaster. I raved about her kitchen but what I failed to mention is she lives on a 30-acre avocado farm.  The avocados are the Hass variety. I can’t get enough of them when I visit, especially since good avocados are hard to come by in Germany.

At Trudi’s, you can just pick one off the tree, slice it in half and eat it with a spoon. They melt in your mouth. With over 600 avocado trees, an avocado lover like me could go nuts.  The grove was picked several weeks ago when I stopped in for a couple of days. Unfortunately, I was short on time then and missed my opportunity to make something with the avocados.

However, she also has a fruit grove with so many delicious things growing in it..persimmons, olives, the most delicious ruby red grapefruits I have ever tasted, strangely shaped apples, lemon-limes, huge lemons, tangerines, peaches, passion fruit vines…to name just a few…

strangely shaped apples

The pomelos were literally falling off the tree. When I almost got beaned in the head by one, I decided renegade fruit was giving me a sign to start baking.  Every morning I ate the sweetest fresh picked red grapefruits, so I decided to combine the two flavors in this recipe.

First I made Pomelo Syrup so I could flavor the buttercream.

I took about four cups of pomelo pulp, added one cup of water, brought it to a boil, stirred it to break down the big pieces.  Then I kept adding sugar to achieve the desired sweetness, let it boil once more and cooled it.  It did retain some bitterness.  I think I should have been more vigilant about how much pith was in the mixture.  However, even though I did like the bitter taste when added to buttercream if I made it again I would experiment a bit by also adding different ingredients to take the bitter taste down a bit.

For the Vanilla Cupcakes,  I used one of my go-to vanilla cupcake recipes.  It is in the back of the Hello Cupcake Book.

I made Pink Grapefruit Curd using Martha’s Grapefruit Curd recipe.

To fill cupcakes: Using a pastry bag (or ziplock bag) and a metal tip, fill the bag and push the tip into the center of the cupcake about three-quarters of the way down, squeeze to fill. Pull straight up when you are done.

Here is the recipe for the Pomelo Buttercream (Bittercream 🙂

2 Sticks of Butter – room temperature
8 Cups Confectionary Sugar
3/4 cup of pomelo syrup

Beat the butter with 2 cups of the sugar until creamy.
Alternately add pomelo syrup and sugar until you get the desired flavor and consistency

Makes enough to frost about 24 cupcakes

Using this recipe from Epicurious I candied the peels of both the pomelos and the red grapefruits to decorate the cupcakes with.

I made a few more recipes before I left for the east coast. However,  there were so many fruits, so many ideas..so little time. I could spend at least a week baking my way through the grove.

I was still thinking up recipes on the flight back to New York….