Week of Menus’ Velvet Cupcakes

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Mom#2’s (aka Nana’s) birthday was last week. She came into town for the day yesterday to look at a couple houses, which means she’ll be spending more time here soon – yay! She took the whole family, ie all her 3 kids and their families, out to dinner. Makes perfect sense that she’d take US out to dinner, right? Well, I’ve learned over there years that there’s no fighting that so the least I could do was to make some cupcakes for her. I wanted to make something different than the usual, something yummy of course and that’s when red velvet cupcakes came to mind. I know so many people who are goo goo ga ga over them so I thought I’d give them a try and went on a hunt.

The one I settled on was Week of Menus’ Velvet Cupcake Recipe. I’ve used many of her recipes and they’ve always been great! What I loved about this was that it was actually Red Velvet without the Red part, ie no food coloring. I rarely ever use food coloring and when I do, I use the kinds that are derived from veggies. But that said, they don’t always work that great nor do they end up with the most vibrant of colors. So, you can bet when I saw this, I was excited to try them out. Little did I realize that Red Velvet is actually a chocolate cake but dyed red with a splash of vinegar! Very interesting.

I was already so excited by the batter alone – it was so light and fluffy. This recipe calls for buttermilk. I had just ran out of the powdered buttermilk I usually use so I just used my go-to buttermilk substitute. To make 1 cup of buttermilk, simply add 1 Tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice to a liquid measuring cup and then add enough milk to make 1 cup. If you need more buttermilk, just adjust the amounts accordingly. In this case I used vinegar but was a little worried because the recipe calls for some vinegar, but worry not, it came out just fine.

And now I’ll just skip right to the good stuff! Stuck the frosting in a big pastry bag and piped it out using a giant star tip.

Ok, wow. These were delicious AND a hit and I’m not even a huge fan of red velvet! After a delicious Italian dinner at Daniel’s Restaurant, I brought out the cupcakes and we sang Happy Birthday to Nana. The cupcakes were a hit and even Little Sis who isn’t a fan of cream cheese frosting ate the whole thing without batting an eye. We had a few leftover so we left one for our serve as well as the foursome at the table behind us who were eyein’ them big time and even jokingly asked “Where’s our?” Why not share the wealth!??! I certainly didn’t need them sitting in my fridge, beckoning me to eat them all!