My Favourite Cupcakes: Red Velvet!

I love to bake and I love to cook.

My mom said if you truly enjoy doing something you will excel at it and it will never feel like work or a chore.  Not only does this apply to my love of cooking/baking but I think it's a great motto to live by.  My mom was full of these inspirational quotes when I was growing up.  She would write them on a piece of paper and post them on the bulletin board in our kitchen ... I might have to do the same but update the look with a chalkboard!

I recently made red velvet cupcakes, and boy were they delicious.  Surprisingly, I actually wasn't familiar with what flavour red velvet cupcakes were.  I just knew they were a red cake base.  So when reading the recipe (I decided to make them cause I thought they sounded fancy) I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they were a chocolate cupcake with a cream cheese frosting.  Delicious. 

I found the below recipe on Annie Eats

Red Velvet Cupcakes

Yield: about 24 cupcakes

Ingredients:

For the cake:

2½ cups cake flour

1½ cups sugar

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tbsp. cocoa powder

1 tsp. salt

2 large eggs

1½ cups vegetable oil

1 cup buttermilk

2 tbsp. (1 oz.) liquid red food coloring

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tsp. distilled white vinegar

For the frosting:*

8 oz. cream cheese

5 tbsp. unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 tsp. vanilla extract

2½ cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350° F.  Line cupcake pans with paper liners.  In a medium bowl, combine the cake flour, sugar, baking soda, cocoa powder and salt; whisk to blend.  In the bowl of an electric mixer, combine the eggs, vegetable oil, buttermilk, food coloring, vanilla and vinegar.  Beat on medium speed until well blended.  Mix in the dry ingredients on low speed and beat until smooth, about 2 minutes.

Divide the batter evenly between the prepared liners.  Bake, rotating the pans halfway through baking, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 18 minutes.  Let cool in the pans 5-10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

To make the frosting, combine the cream cheese and butter in the bowl of an electric mixer.  Beat on medium-high speed until well combined and smooth, about 2-3 minutes.  Mix in the vanilla extract.  Gradually beat in the confectioners’ sugar until totally incorporated, increase the speed and then beat until smooth.  Frost cooled cupcakes as desired.  (I used a large, unlabeled star tip to frost these cupcakes.)

*If you are big on frosting as I am, you may want to increase the quantities by 50%.  That is what I typically do for a batch of 24 cupcakes.  I usually end up with some left over, but I would rather have too much frosting than not enough!

Here is a picture of my version of Annie Eat's Red Velvet Cupcakes!!!  Unfortunately I didn't know how much red food coloring I needed so I didn't have enough to make them a dark red.  The color didn't affect the flavour!  Also, I completely agree with the note Annie mentioned on the frosting.  I love adding a lot of frosting to make the cupcake more visually appealing (and who doesn't LOVE cream cheese icing).



Here is my OOTD today!  I didn't feel like wearing jeans (even thought it's Friday), I wanted to dress up a little, so I took a dress that I usually wear out on the weekends and paired it with a more casual top!

jean shirt - jcrew

dress - aritzia