Warning: this is not a healthy post! Cupcakes inside

Whether you celebrate it or not, I'm sure none of you were able to avoid the perils of valentines day. I don't usually celebrate it - in fact I don't think Dan and I were in the same county for it last year. This year however I decided to get my baking hat on! Refined, processed ingredients all up in here. These cupcakes are not for me after all.

One ingredient you often see in red velvet recipes is vinegar (makes it very easy to avoid licking the bowl once that's been added). Vinegar and bicarbonate soda have some kind of reaction with each other - I don't know the science but there was a lot of fizzing.

Red velvet always looks delicious - it's rich red colour comes from food colouring nowadays but back in the day, bakers used to use beet root to make the cakes stand out and stay moist for longer. So now we've all learnt something.

My cakes didn't turn out as red as I would expect them to with a whole bottle of red food colouring! Perhaps 'natural food colouring' wasn't potent enough? It's a very satisfying cake mix to make! You have to make a thick paste with cocoa powder and red food dye and then mix it in with your butter/sugar/egg mix.







On reflection I think I lost quite a lot of this paste moving it from one bowl to another, so perhaps next time I will use larger quantities of the paste to make up for the lost bits.

Anyway the mixture is mega light and airy, and they cooked perfectly.

After leaving them to cool for a while I decided to get started on the cream cheese topping. Now one bit of advice... Add the icing sugar bit by bit! I went for it all at once, inhaled a tonne of icing sugar and managed to get a layer of icing sugar covering everything within a 1m radius. Including myself.

And that's it! I used this recipe which is from the Hummingbird bakery. Here
Decorate however you so wish :) and enjoy!

I don't want to taint this indulgent post but my boyfriend very kindly make me a 'clean' frozen cheesecake! Still to be tasted. I'll post about it soon. YUM!


Enjoy your weekend,

Minnie
xXx