Red Velvet Explosion

It doesn't always go right when I bake. I mean I have a pretty good idea when things are all going to pot, but this time I'm not even sure what I did wrong! But last night it certainly did....

My friend had asked me to make 20 red velvet cupcakes with white frosting for her son's birthday party. I used the recipe from Cake Days and doubled it. Hummingbird reckons the batch would result in 12-16 cupcakes so I make two batches together. Everything was fine until I added the cocoa powder/red colouring/vanilla to the mixture and it, uh, didnt mix.

It's a little difficult to see but there were specks of cocoa and red food colouring that didn't quite mix with the rest of it. I wasn't happy with it but thought I'd bung them into the oven to see if it would disperse when cooking and it may not be noticable. It was.

The little pockets of dye must have just exploded in the oven and resulted in a rather messy batch of cupcakes. I was really disappointed - mainly because I'd wasted 2x the ingredients for red velvet cupcakes and a good portion of my evening. I also discovered the old Kenwood Chef from the 50s might be great, but it's mix speeds of 'still' and 'fast' don't always cut it.

So I popped out to Tesco to buy more ingredients and started again. Except this time I just made one batch with the intention of doing the rest this morning.

Shockingly, the batch that was meant to make 12-16 actually resulted in 23!!

It looks a little bit like Heinz Tomato Soup but it can assure you it didn't taste that way!!

They came out the oven looking pretty good. A couple had 'bubbled' at the edge a little but they to tend to do that a little if you overfill the cases. I've adopted the method of using an ice cream scoop to make sure the sizes are consistent and it's really worked.

I waited this til morning to make the frosting as I like to frost them right after it's made. I used double the amount of vanilla frosting that the recipe calls for because I piped it on, rather than spreading it as they suggest. But that's what my friend wanted. :)

I'm not going to lie - I'm not keen on the frosting. I thought it looked a little amateur but there wasn't much I could do. I wasn't sure if it was the consistency of it or the fact I was using a new nozzle but I really didn't like the way they came out. My friend was pleased with them though when I delivered them today and they looked much better when displayed on the trays she picked out.

Just hope the birthday boy is pleased with them.