So, full disclosure, I meant to make some red velvet cupcakes for my friend Gill. I hadn’t seen her in ages and she loves red velvet. I’m visiting my parents right now, and while I was making these I realized they were out of red food coloring – so I made do and used green! I don’t recommend it, really.
Red Velvet, or really, any color velvet cupcakes are just smooth chocolate cupcakes with food coloring – and traditionally topped with cream cheese frosting.
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 oz red food coloring
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon vinegar
1 teaspoon baking soda
It’s just a little complicated, but totally worth it. First, prepare your cupcake tins with liners and set the oven to 350 degrees.
Whisk the flour, baking powder and salt.
In a small bowl, combine the cocoa powder and the food coloring.
Cream together the butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla.
Then I mixed the cocoa and food coloring mixture into the butter mixture.
Now, I have two bowls. One with the flour mixture and one with the butter mixture.
To the butter mixture, I alternated adding some of the buttermilk and some of the flour mixture. If you don’t have buttermilk, just add a little vinegar to the milk.
Then, as a very last touch, I mixed the vinegar and baking soda (this is a fun step to include the kids in) and added that in at the end.
Then I poured the batter into silicone cupcake liners and baked for 22 minutes.
I tapped some confectioner’s sugar over about 1/3 of the cupcakes, I left some totally plain and I topped the rest with cream cheese frosting. I just used 1lb of cream cheese, 1 tablespoon of vanilla about 4 cups of confectioner’s sugar. Just cream it all together!
