Little H had a playdate with her cute little friends and I made these cupcakes for them. Needless to say the kids loved them and gobbled them in seconds after licking up the icing.
Rainbow cupcakes
I used joy of baking’s vanilla cupcake recipe (http://www.joyofbaking.com/VanillaCupcakes.html) with just a few minor adjustments for the basic white batter. You can use your favorite white cake or vanilla cake recipe or even a boxed mix. Just make sure to use a recipe which can tolerate a lot of mixing in the end when you are mixing up the food dyes. In order to make sure that my cupcakes do not get dry due to over mixing I added quarter cup more milk and two tablespoons oil to the original recipe. Oil makes cakes moist while butter adds flavor. In most recipes you can safely substitute some of the butter for oil to make the end result more moist.
So here is my recipe (Makes 12 muffins):
Ingredients:
1/2 cup (113 grams) unsalted butter, room temperature
2/3 cup (130 grams) granulated white sugar
3 large eggs ( i used 3.5 small eggs because I did not have large ones)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups (195 grams) all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (120 ml) milk
Method:
Line and set aside a 12 cup muffin pan.
Mix and sieve the flour, salt, baking powder and keep aside. Beat butter for 2 minutes. Then add oil and beat. Then cream butter and sugar for a good few minutes until the mixture turns fluffy and pale. Add eggs one at a time mixing well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla extract. N
Now alternately fold in the flour mixture and milk in 3 additions beginning and ending with the flour mixture. Use a spatula to fold in flour and milk and be ultra gentle swirling the spatula in a clockwise or anti clockwise direction. It is important to be gentle here because we will be mixing in the dyes later so if you over mix at this stage you will end up with rubbery cupcakes.
Once your batter is smooth divide in 4 bowls. I used an ice cream scoop to divide it. Then add a few drops of yellow, red, blue and green food colors to the four bowls and mix gently. You can use as many colors as you want. I just used these four.
Once your batter is ready, put around 1.5 teaspoon of each color in your muffin pan. As you put it you will get an idea of how much to put of each color. Once done put it in the preheated oven at 180 degrees for 15-20 minutes. Mine were done in 19 minutes. It is always good to take out cupcakes when they have very few crumbs sticking to the toothpick. I find if I wait for the toothpick to come out dry they usually end up dry and I like my muffins really moist. As you can see in the picture these cupcakes had a tender moist crumb and were just perfect.
Buttercream Frosting
I frosted these with a basic butter cream frosting. And followed a tutorial on YouTube from cupcake addiction for rainbow icing. The recipe for Buttercream frosting is:
Ingredients
250 g Icing sugar
125 g Butter
2 tbsp milk or light cream (I personally prefer cream)
1 tsp vanilla extract
Method
Beat butter until pale and fluffy. Then add half the sugar, 1 tbsp milk, vanilla extract and beat until all of it is incorporated. Then add the remaining half of sugar and beat for at least 5 minutes until it turns light and airy. The trick to a good butter cream is to beat it well. Once the icing is ready divide it in 3 bowls and add a few drops of red, blue and yellow colors. Mix well. Then fill your piping bag and pipe away. You need to watch a few videos to get the hang of it. I really liked the Youtube video from cupcake addiction. Making perfect rainbow swirls takes time but the end result is well worth the effort 🙂
Happy baking!
TheToddlerDiary 