Retirement Celebration Treats!

These goodies were made to celebrate an upcoming retirement. There are lemon cupcakes with lemon meringue buttercream and white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. I arranged them on a four-tier tower that I recently received as a gift. 

The recipe for the lemon cupcakes was one I have tried before with a different icing. The lemon meringue buttercream was a new recipe and one that I'll definitely be doing again! It involved making a homemade lemon curd that you mix into an Italian meringue buttercream. The final step of making the buttercream was adding Framboise, which I questioned initially.... why add raspberry liqueur to lemon buttercream? Well, it definitely made the icing better... if anything it tasted more lemony after adding the liqueur.  

There were both regular-size and mini cupcakes. For the cookies, I used a cookie recipe I've done many times before and substituted white chocolate and macadamia nuts for the chocolate chips I usually use. They were delicious and disappeared VERY quickly! And now I'm off to make gumpaste flowers... I just had an order of supplies come in from the UK and I need to put them to good use!