Take a bite...

My first time trying these and it will not be the last...

A wonderful friend of mine, Bianca (link website) turned me on to this amazing website which I have fallen head over heals for. Bakerella is her name and sweet baking is her game. I have been looking over her site for weeks and decided to give one of her recipes a try.

 

You can't make a Red Velvet cake without A LOT of red food coloring...

My daughter is a huge lover of all things sweet, so when I asked her if she would rather me make a pop cake, or a cupcake bite, she went with the cupcakes. I decided on the red velvet recipe of hers for the base, and rather than using a cream cheese icing I have decided to go with a simple vanilla buttercream. Here is the recipe of hers, but you can see her full entry on this cake (here):

Red Velvet Cake

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 Tablespoon cocoa
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups oil
1 cup buttermilk
1 Tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 oz. red food coloring
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Grease and flour two 8 inch cake pans.
Lightly stir eggs in a medium bowl with a wire whisk. Add remaining liquid ingredients and stir together with whisk until blended. Set aside.

 

I seriously thought that I had put way too much red coloring, the liquid mixtures turned out bright fuchsia.

Place all the dry ingredients in your mixing bowl and stir together really good with another wire whisk.
Add wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix on medium-high for about a minute or until completely combined.
Pour into cake pans and then drop the pans on the counter a few times to release any air bubbles.
Bake for about 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
After about ten minutes, remove from pans and cool completely on a wire rack. I also cover in plastic wrap while the cakes cool.
Then make the frosting.Fm there I made a simple buttercream and once that was done the fun began. I broke the cake up into a crumble, and then I added the buttercream and mixed. At first I was being all dainty and was using a spoon, but I decided to be at one with the cupcake bites and I started using my hands.

 This was probably my favorite part... Getting my hands dirty.

Flashbacks of being a child playing with play dough came to my head :). Once it was mixed as well as I assumed it would need to be, I started to make tiny quarter sized balls of the cake-icing mixture and set them aside on a parchment paper lined baking sheet.

 

Getting these just the right size was tough, I kept making them too big and had to eat some of the bad ones. Oh darn...

I let them settle in the freezer for a few minutes and followed the rest of the recipe. Make the chocolate cups by ,doting some chocolate into little chocolate cups molds, put a cake ball in cup, freeze a bit more, pop out and decorate. Im breaking it down incredibly fast, but if you head on over to the Bakerella website, you can find recipe after recipe of different ways to make these. And a much more in-depth way of making these.

 

Decorating the cupcake bites was my favorite part. I melted down some purple wafers, dipped my cupcake bites in and sprinkled them with little cupcake toppings. SO. MUCH. FUN.

And I have to say, they taste pretty darn good. Bakerella knows how to make one mean red velvet cake.
Take a look at how they turned out...

I heart baking.