The next 4th of July project was inspired by Recipe Girl at recipegirl.com. We loved the cute festive cupcakes yet wanted to try and make the recipe a little easier (having two little ones means that I try and do most of my projects while they are both taking a nap so basically everything gets cut back to under an hour). Well here is my take on recipegirl's red, white and blue cupcakes!
Step One: The first short cut was to start off with a boxed cake mix instead of starting from scratch. If you want to "beef up" the boxed stuff I suggest adding some high quality ingredients to give it a more homemade taste. For example, on this recipe I used Pillsbury white cake mix and added a few teaspoons of pure vanilla extract. Other than this one simple addition just mix all the ingredients as directed on the box.
Step Two: Split the batter into three even parts. Leave one part white and color one part red and the last part blue. Recipe girl used gel paste to color but I used what I had...which in this case was Wal-mart brand food coloring for the blue (about seven drops) and Wilton paste for the red (roughly a teaspoon).
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| My red Wilton icing color and Great Value food colors |
Step Three: In order to add batter to the cupcake tins (which I lined with red, white and blue cupcake liners) I used an ice cream scoop/cookie scoop to put the batter into the liners. Not really sure what the scoop's technical name is but hopefully the picture below will help.
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| The best invention ever....my cupcake/cookie scoop! |
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The scoop holds roughly two tablespoons of batter. Also make sure that when you scoop out batter from the bowls that you run the scoop up the side of the bowl to make it level. This way you have a better chance of making all the cupcakes equal size. Once you are done filling each cupcake with one scoop of each color, bake the cupcakes for roughly 18 minutes at 350 degrees.
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| Cupcake tin filled with one scoop of each color batter. |
When I use the scoop I tend to end up with extra batter so this recipe should make roughly 24 cupcakes and 12 mini cupcakes. Once the cupcakes are done baking let them cool completely. I usually take the cupcakes out of the tin and sit them on a cooling rack.
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| Yummy cupcakes cooling down on the cooling rack. |
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| Mini cupcakes right out of the oven. |
Step Four: Time to ice! Again in order to save time I used two cans of Pillsbury whipped white icing instead of making the icing from scratch. Just like with the batter I separated the icing into three even parts and used the same food coloring amounts to color the icing. I tried two different techniques to ice the cupcakes. First I used a Wilton 9 inch plastic decorating bag with a star tip. In order to get the multi color effect with the icing Recipe Girl says you need to fill the decorating bag with all three colors side by side...this was no easy task. I used a "spoonula" (the rubber spatula scraper thing that is concave) in order to fill the bag with a scoop of each icing color. After filling I piped on the icing starting at the outside of the cupcake and circling into the middle. This came out okay but because the decorating bag was small I was only able to frost roughly five cupcakes before it was empty. Since I hate trying to refill a decorating bag I switched over to the Wilton Dessert Decorator Plus. Using the same technique I added a spoonula full of each color icing to the tube and started decorating! This was much easier and I was able to frost twice as many cupcakes this way.
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| Gingham Girl and I felt the star tip gave the cupcakes a much better look than the round tip. Which just made the cupcakes look like they were covered in toothpaste. |
I would say this project took a total of an hour and a half. Also here is the web address for the original project from Recipe Girl:
http://www.recipegirl.com/2007/06/01/red-white-and-blue-cupcakes/
