Red Velvet Cupcakes

I know I've already posted about Red Velvet Cupcakes on this blog in the past, but I wanted to share them with you again. I can't get enough of these wonderful, soft, moist cupcakes. They're usually my go to when I need something to bake that I know will turn out well, and I often get requests to make them for various occassions. Recently my sister Andrea approached me about doing some baking for my niece, Ruby's christening. She requested these Red Velvet Cupcakes and a White Chocolate Mud cake (which I'll post about soon). I found these beautiful Robert Gordon patty pans in a cooking shop in the Melbourne CBD and just had to buy some to use for the cupcakes. Perfect for a little girl I think!

My sister had about 20-25 people coming so I wanted to aim for everyone to get at least one cupcake each. I started off making just one batch first to see how many I could get, and then made a second batch, ending up with about 30 cakes in total. I was able to stick with one batch of the cream cheese frosting mixture though, as it was enough to cover all the cupcakes.

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups cake flour (to make cake flour - for each cup of cake flour required replace 2 tbsp of plain flour with 2 tbsp corn flour)
2 tbsp Cocoa Powder
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups caster sugar
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
2 eggs
1/2 tsp red gel food colouring
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup buttermilk
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp white vinegar
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. Whisk together cake flour, cocoa and salt.

2. With an electric mixer on medium-high speed, whisk together sugar and oil until combined. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Mix in food color and vanilla.

3. Reduce speed to low. Add flour mixture in three batches, alternating with two additions of buttermilk, and whisking well after each. Stir together the baking soda and vinegar in a small bowl (it will foam); add mixture to the batter, and mix on medium speed 10 seconds.

4. Divide batter evenly among lined cups, filling each three-quarters full. Bake, rotating tins halfway through, until a cake tester inserted in centers comes out clean, about 20 minutes.

Transfer tins to wire racks to cool completely before removing cupcakes. Cupcakes can be stored overnight at room temperature, or frozen up to 2 months, in airtight containers.

5. To finish, use a small offset spatula to spread cupcakes with frosting. Refrigerate up to 3 days in airtight containers; bring to room temperature before serving.

Recipe Source:
Martha Stewart website
Red Velvet Cupcakes

Heart shaped Red Velvet Whoopie Pies

I'm not big on Valentines Day. I'm actually one of those people who usually scoff at it. But I think it's just because I don't have a partner, and deep down I know that if I did I'd probably love v-day (as I call it) if I had a partner. lol I know, I'm fickle. But this year, a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to help her organise a picnic with our other girl friends for Valentines Day. And I jumped on the bandwagon. I love picnics and it was a great excuse to catch up with the girls. I was originally going to make the Conversation Heart Cookies from Annie's Eats but couldn't find all the tools I needed to do the icing on the cookies in time. So instead I chose another great looking recipe from the same website - Red Velvet Whoopie Pies.

For the biscuits:
2 cups flour
2 tbsp cocoa
½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
8 tbsp unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup brown sugar, packed
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
½ cup buttermilk
25ml red food coloring
For the icing:
225g cream cheese
5 tbsp unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 tsp vanilla extract
2½ cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

First I used a heart cookie cutter that I'd purchased to make the cookies with, and traced around it on baking paper to make my heart templates. The baking paper then had to be placed pencil side down on the baking tray. The heart shapes were still visible through the paper.

To make the biscuits, I mixed together all the dry ingredients (except the sugar) in one bowl and then in a seperate bowl I creamed together the butter and sugar. To this butter mixture I beat in the egg and then stirred in the vanilla. I then alternated between adding and stirring in a third of the dry ingredients and half of the buttermilk until both were all used up. And lastly I added in the red food colouring. I didn't have any gel colours so I had to use the liquid food colouring. I ended up using half a bottle which made a beautiful, vibrant red colour.

Next came the hardest part for me. I had to put the mixture for the biscuits into a piping bag (I had a tupperware version) and squeeze it out onto the baking tray using the heart shape templates I'd drawn earlier. I'm not sure if it was the tip I was using (I didn't have a plain one to use) or the fact that I'd had no practise doing this but most of my biscuits ended up heart-ish shaped, and some ended up being bigger than others.

The biscuits then went into a 190 degree Celsius oven for 9 minutes before being transferred onto a cooling rack.

While the biscuits were cooling I decided to make the icing so it was ready to go when I needed it. To make this I beat the cream cheese and butter together, before mixing in the vanilla and then gradually adding and beating in the icing sugar.

Once the biscuits had cooled I paired them all up with biscuits of the same shape/size. I then filled my tupperware piping container with the icing and piped it onto the flat side of half of the cookies before sandwiching the biscuits pair on top.

I was pretty happy with how my whoopie pies turned out, especially since it was the first time I've ever made them and also the first time I've made shaped cookies. I managed to get them all vaguelly heart shaped, even though they weren't absolutely perfect and most importantly my friends raved about them!

Recipe Source: Annie's Eats