She Baked Red Velvet

[hum the title of this post to yourself to the tunes of Blue Velvet]
So while I am taking this afternoon off to get an early start to the weekend spent at a spa resort, I leave you to drool over the red velvet cupcakes I baked last weekend. This has been something I had always been interested in, without actually having ever tasted "the original" anywhere. When I watched Laura Vitale's mouth-watering demonstration, I just couldn't wait any longer and turned out the Kitchen Aid. Here's the video:

I made the discovery that European food colouring is obvioiusly not remotely as potent as its American counterparts as despite tipping in the whole vial of red powder (will try and find liquid next time), it did not turn out remotely as red, verging on "brown velvet". Other than that, I was extremely happy with the result and my usual office guinea-pigs made sounds of approval as well. I also had Meticulous M over on Sunday afternoon, as she loves cupcakes in general:

I doubled Laura's recipe and made 22 of these little buggers. Here's a view of the innards, should you need further convincing:

Despite having no filling, they were lovely and fluffy and the frosting added just that extra textural and taste kick to round it off. The recipe really is super easy and doesn't contain any fancy ingredients that are hard to find. I found it unusual to use both baking powder and baking soda in the same recipe, but it seems to work.