Lemon Blueberry Cupcakes

Whereas most of the recipes I have posted are true recipes, this one is not really.  However, it is the starting point for what will likely be something far closer to a homemade recipe, so I am posting it as a bit of an evolution.  My younger son's birthday is near the end of August, so I have the luxury of planning and experimenting.  My older son'e birthday falls in April, so he is lucky if we are even in town, as many years that weekend is state competition for Odyssey of the Mind...

Anyway, the younger one's favorite flavors in most things are lemon and blueberry, so I decided to play around and see if I could make a lemon blueberry cake/cupcakes in a relatively simple fashion.  Ordinarily, unless there is a really good reason to do otherwise, I tend to use a cake mix for the cake itself.  Most often people cannot tell the difference, as the cake mixes tend to be fairly good.  I will often opt for the butter recipe mixes or other moist mixes.  This one is the Betty Crocker Super Moist Lemon Cake mix.  I will likely use this, even for the final cake, as it was quite good.

I usually have a pet peeve about frostings, however.  I almost always make the frosting from scratch because most canned frostings taste like preservatives.  However, when I decided how this cake should come together, I wanted to use cream cheese frosting, and I ended up with a can of it at some point, so I decided that while I was experimenting, I would use that.  (For his birthday, I will have homemade.

I did use fresh blueberries.  They are at the peak of their season and were running $1.50 per pint last week, so we had a bunch.

To see whether this would work, I made the cake batter according to the box, stirred in half a pint of blueberries, and filled the cupcake wrappers to about half to two-thirds full.  I baked the cupcakes and frosted with cream cheese frosting, decorating each with one fresh blueberry on top.  Everyone enjoyed them, and my younger one does want a lemon blueberry cake for his birthday.

The tentative plan for the cake - he would like a minion shaped layer cake.  He joked, asking if I could put a layer of blueberries under the frosting.  I explained that would not work, because they would roll off, but since it will be layers, I offered to put a layer of blueberry compote between the layers, so it gets that extra burst of blueberry.  He sounded quite excited about that idea.  I am thinking one round and two square pans (the round halves will layer with each other) so I am not sure whether to go with one or two mixes.  I will now start figuring out the details so I can make this work.  He did ask why I made them now with his birthday a month and a half away.  I explained that I didn't want it too close, because he might not enjoy it as much if he had just had it.  He nodded and declared that made a lot of sense.  I will post more once the cake has taken form...