Red Velvet Cupcakes

As you may know, my other passion is baking. So I decided to post a recipe today for Red Velvet cupcakes that I made earlier. Most recipes online are for 24 cupcakes, but honestly who's going to eat that many cupcakes unless you're making it for a party or whatnot.

So this is a mix of different recipes I found online and slightly adjusted to make it suitable for me and my little convection oven (which I actually bought recently, best purchase along with my Kenwood Stand Mixer :D)

Okay, so this recipe makes 12 standard sized cupcakes
For those 12 little delightful mouthfuls (or two) you will need:

• 117g Self Raising Flour
• 7g Cocoa Powder
• 125g Caster Sugar
• 1/4tsp Salt
• 135g Soft Unsalted Butter chopped into cubes (I use Stork for all my baking)
• 2 Large Free Range Eggs
• 1 1/2 tbsp Buttermilk (or 6ml Milk & 19ml Yogurt)
• 1/2 tsp Red food paste
• 1/2 tsp Vanilla Bean Paste
• 4g Bicarbonate of Soda
• 3/4 tsp Lemon Juice

Cream Cheese Frosting

• 37g Soft Unsalted Butter (or Stork)
• 60g Cream Cheese
• 210g sifted Icing Sugar

To start off with I set my brand spanking new convection oven on 180 degrees.

Next I sifted all my dry ingredients; that would be flour, sugar, cocoa & salt into my mixing bowl and attached it onto the mixer. Then I added in my Stork(butter) and eggs and mixed that at a low to medium speed for a couple minutes, until it was all smooth.

If you don't have a mixer you can use a hand mix or use the classic bowl and wooden spoon.

While I left that to mix, as I didn't have buttermilk, I mixed together milk and natural yogurt in a small bowl and added in the red food paste with the vanilla bean paste and mixed that together until I got a very bloody looking mixture. I added the blood mix into the cake mixture and that got whizzed for a couple of minutes on medium speed.

The last thing I did was mix the lemon juice and bicarb, which become frothy and added that into the batter and gave it one last mix.

I then put some cases into 2 muffin trays. I equally shared my mixture between the cases using an ice-cream scoop and put them into bake at 180 degrees for 20 minutes, swapping the trays over half way so they'd cook evenly.

Once they finished cooking, I took them out and left them to cool, during this time I made the frosting.

For the frosting I mixed the butter and cream cheese until they became fluffy and then added in half the icing sugar and mixed that, I then added in the remainder of the icing sugar and mixed it all together until it became light and fluffy.

After the cakes had cooled down completely, I piped on the frosting with a large circle nozzled piping bag and topped mine with some wafer flowers, malteasers and micro edible pearls that I had lying around... and VOILA!

P.s sorry this post is so wordy, next time I do a bake, I'll try and take more pictures whilst I'm baking so you guys can see exactly what I'm doing at each stage.