Red Velvet Cupcakes

It's not that I'm not cooking, I just either forget the camera, or lose the recipe, or don't have the time to post. June and July was too much travelling and well work's been hard so here I am finally posting.

I finally did it! I've always been intrigued by this cake, the red velvet cake, and was heavily disappointed to discover its a mildly chocolate cake that's red. Until I ate one at the cupcake heaven on Vine Street in Berkeley. While I love me some luscious evil death by chocolate cake, there's a lot of joy in a plain ol cocoa cake. You can taste the butter. And the salt. And a lot of other things. Anyway, I managed to find some red food colouring, and it set in my shelf in the pantry for ever. Three months into living at the parental house mean I have barely cooked, let alone baked. Plus, every time I did cook, I was left with a giant slab of cake in the fridge that I ended up eating!




The solution came to me suddenly - cupcakes! And scaling every recipe down to one egg. Yes, really. One. Heh.

The cake is from here, and the frosting from here. I was very worried cos I had no vinegar and I don't use it much so I didn't want to buy some just for this and all the recipes called for it! I decided to ditch and take my chances. I think it had a titch much baking powder and salt, but the latter's probably because I like to use salted butter. The batter looked hideous - browny orange and more like rust cake than red velvet, but as you can see, they turned out fine!

4T butter
3/4C sugar
1 egg
21/2T cocoa
11/2 t red food colouring (powder)
1/2t vanilla
1/2C buttermilk
1C + 2T flour
1/2 t bp

Beat the butter and sugar until fluffy. Beat in the egg. Mix the cocoa, vanilla and colouring together separately, and add half buttermilk to make it pourable. Add to the egg-butter-sugar mix and beat in. Add half flour, and mix in, followed by rest of buttermilk and rest of flour. Bake at 160C for 20 min. This made 16 mini cupcakes.

Cream cheese frosting was pushing it so I went for simple vanilla.
3/4C butter
11/2 C sugar
1 1/2t vanilla
1 1/2T cream
Cream butter. Beat em all up together. Apply to cupcakes. I found this was too much frosting because I STILL have some leftover and it was a bit too much for tiny cakes. First time froster, forgive me if they don't look too good!

They were amazing. More than one person remembered the frosting all day, and the cakes themselves were light and soft and yummy, and cocoa-y...