Red Velvet Cupcakes

I've only baked a red velvet cake once before when I made my partner a gumball machine cake and it had to be very dense to keep the sweets part of the cake up. I liked the taste but wish I could make something more light and fluffy and this lead me to bake some red velvet cupcakes.

I took me a while to find a recipe that I wanted to attempt, some seemed way to complicated but after coming across this Nigella Lawson recipe I knew this one was the one for me. The best thing about today's bake was that I got to have family time with my second cousin from South Africa.

Ingredients

250g plain flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
100g soft unsalted butter (I used stork)
200g caster sugar
1 heaped tablespoon of red food colouring
2 teaspoons of villa extract
2 large eggs (I use free range) 
175 buttermilk
1 teaspoon cider vinegar

For the frosting:

500g icing sugar
125g cream cheese
125g soft unsalted butter
1 teaspoon cider vinegar

Method

First, mix all the dry ingredients together.  

Cream the butter and sugar together. It would look like it normal does. It will more like a dough.

Like this.

Add the food colouring. We used paste.

Mix. It takes a while but it should get up like this.

Add the vanilla extract. We used this one as the baking stuff was 3 for 2 at Tesco.

It smelt so good :)

Mix in the dry ingredients, and eggs bit by bit before adding the butter milk and cider vinegar. This is the second time I have use butter milk. The first time I used it was for blueberry and almond muffins and I think it's a winner for making your cakes oozy.

Separate into cupcake cases. The recipe said it makes 24 but we were a bit generous with the mix so it ended up making 21.

We put all the frosting ingredients in at the same time then realised we needed a food processor. So we mixed them genitally then once incorporated we whizzed them together with the electric mixer.      

The best part about this bake was playing with some different piping nozzles.

These were the results.

We found some raspberry fudge cake toppers which I loved as it reminded me of my polka dot background. They also gave a burst of flavour which complemented the sponge. 

I will defintly bake these again as they went down a treat. I shared with friends the next day and they really liked them too.

If you like chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting why not give it a go?

Happy baking,

Ms B

xx