Cute Easter Chick Lemon and Vanilla Cupcakes

Easter is one of my favourite times of the year, and these cute Easter chick lemon and vanilla cupcakes are the perfect sweet treat for the occasion!

A soft vanilla yellow sponge cupcake is topped with a simple lemon buttercream frosting in the shape of an adorable baby chick. Fondant (modelling) icing is used to create eyes, a beak and little feet to complete the cute Easter cupcake topper.

These easy Easter cupcakes are the perfect bake for an Easter dessert or to enjoy at a Spring party! Kids and adults will love these colourful and cute cupcakes. Especially as the smooth vanilla sponge balances out the zesty buttercream frosting to make one delicious cupcake!

Jump to:

• ✏️ Making a tasty and easy recipe
• 🥘 Ingredients notes
• 🔪 Equipment notes
• 🍱 Cupcake storage
• 💭 Top tips for success
• ♻️ Alternatives and substitutions
• 🧁 Other goodies
• 📋 Recipe

✏️ Making a tasty and easy recipe

When it comes to Easter desserts and Easter baking ideas, for me, it’s the cuter the better! And what could be cuter than these little baby chick cupcakes, all bright yellow with fluffy little wings? My inspiration for this cupcake is an adaption from The Simple-Sweet Life's chick cupcakes.

I like it when my desserts have colours that match their flavours, so for a yellow chick, it made sense to make it from lemon-flavoured frosting. That way, you only need to add a bit of food colouring to get bright and fun colours.

When I knew I wanted to make lemon chick cupcakes, I wanted to make them both cute and easy. I’m a pretty lazy baker, so the simple approach is always the one I’d prefer.

These frosted chick cupcakes are basically made of two big blobs of yellow American-style buttercream for the body and head, then two small frosting blobs for wings and a few pieces of fondant (modelling) icing rolled into eyes, feet and a beak.

🥘 Ingredients notes

• As with many of my baking recipes, I recommend starting with room temperature ingredients for these cute Easter cupcakes. This will improve the consistency and ease at which your ingredients will mix together.

• I prefer to use vanilla extract rather than vanilla essence, as it has a better stronger flavour. It’s a purer vanilla taste as it’s less processed than vanilla essence.

• Always sieve your flour, baking powder and icing sugar. I used to be a bit lazy and skip this part, but it really makes such a difference to get you a lump-free mixture.

• When measuring your ingredients, I always recommend using weights rather than cups for greater accuracy. This is especially important for the amount of flour.

🔪 Equipment notes

• I like to use digital scales for weighing my ingredients as it's easier and more accurate than other scales (or using no scales!). I'm a fan of these KitchenAid or Salter ones!

• Use measuring spoons for your teaspoon and tablespoon amounts where possible. Make sure the scoops filled with your ingredients are levelled before adding them to your mix!

🍱 Cupcake storage

Once decorated and finished, it's best to place cupcakes into an airtight container. These lemon chick cupcakes should keep for several days in storage at room temperature.

If you want to freeze your cupcakes, you can wrap the unfrosted cupcakes in plastic wrap / cling film and freeze them.

Your buttercream frosting can also be frozen in an airtight container. Both should keep for 1-2months in the freezer.

Defrost and use as normal per recipe. The buttercream may need to be beaten again to whip up to nice and fluffy before use.

💭 Top tips for success

Cupcake making tips:

• When making cupcakes with raising agents (i.e. using self-raising flour, baking powder, baking soda, etc.) such as the chick cupcakes in this recipe, try to not over-mix your cake batter. The texture of your cake will be dense rather than a light and airy sponge.

• When pouring your cupcake batter into the cupcake liners in the muffin tin (I quite like the Wilton muffin pans!) you only need to fill each of your cupcake cases to roughly ⅔ full. If you fill it more than this, you might have your cupcakes looking a bit more like muffins as they may spill over!

• Don’t open the oven mid-bake. You’ll have probably heard this advice before, but it’s such an important factor that it bears repeating. I’ve been there before and nobody likes a cake with a sinkhole!

Buttercream frosting tips:

• For a gorgeously creamy lemon buttercream frosting, start by beating your butter until it’s light and fluffy. It could just be me, but this always seems to take longer than I think. It should be several minutes of beating the butter if using a stand / electric mixer. This will go a long way in giving you creamy and light frosting.

• Another easy buttercream frosting tip is to only add the colouring one drop at a time, and to note that your colour will develop and strengthen over time. This means that you should stop adding more colouring a shade lighter than you’d like your final colour to be. For the buttercream frosting chick here, I use only 1-2 drops of yellow gel food colouring.

Cupcake decoration tips:

• Using fondant (modelling) icing can be a bit fiddly. You can use small tools to help you such as toothpicks and small knives if needed. It’s also a good idea to warm up your fondant in your hands a little before you start so that it’s easier to manipulate. It’s pretty cold where I am, so if I don’t do this it can crack and crumble a bit rather than mould smoothly.

Troubleshooting help:

If you’ve got any specific questions on making these Easter chicken lemon and vanilla cupcakes, please feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll try my best to help out!

Alternatively, you can get in touch via my Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest – I’d love to hear from you!

♻️ Alternatives and substitutions

I think these little Easter yellow chicks look adorable as Easter cupcake toppers. However, I also realised that if you flattened the beak a little too much, they actually look like little ducklings! You can turn these cupcakes into duckling cupcakes by flatting the beak to make it wide and also flattening the feet to give the impression of webbed feet instead.

If you like a lot of lemon flavour, you can also add 1 lemon’s zest to the vanilla cupcake.

I usually use plain flour in this cupcake recipe, but alternatively you can swap plain flour for self-raising flour of the same quantity (170g for a standard-sized batch) and reduce the baking powder by 1 ½ teaspoon

For the buttercream frosting for these baby chick cupcakes, I use a piping bag and an open circle piping nozzle for the head / body, then an open star piping nozzle for the wings. This 3-piece set from Wilton has the ones I use most often for my cupcakes.

Alternatively, if you don’t have a piping bag or a round open nozzle, you can use a plastic sandwich / freezer bag with the corner cut off instead. If you've got no open star nozzles, you can use this method to blob on some wings too!

🧁 Other goodies

I definitely recommend that you whip up a batch of these deliciously soft and easy little chick lemon cupcakes! But as an avid home baker, I’m sure you’re asking yourself “what next?”.

Well, if you’re looking for more great Easter baking ideas, take a look at my recipe for a hot cross bun muffin – a fun twist on the traditional Easter food. They’re great for an Easter breakfast, brunch or dessert!

Or if you’re a chocolate fan, take a look at these Easter bunny chocolate malt cupcakes with vanilla malt buttercream - they'd go great alongside these lemon chick cupcakes for your next Easter or Spring party!

If you love all things fruity and zesty, check out my recipe for an easy lemon and white chocolate cake – perfect for birthday parties! These classic lemon bars and fruity homemade raspberry curd bars would also be great as Spring and Summer sweet treats!

Looking forward to some new recipes? Check out my Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest pages for a few sneak peeks and some sweet inspiration! Or if you’d like to hear about our latest recipes, why not subscribe to our newsletter?

📋 Recipe

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