Spread the rainbow

I love rainbows.

No, really. However much I wear black and kid myself I'm really cool, I'm a total sucker for anything brightly coloured. Extra points if it's sweet. Which is why these are the first cupcakes I made from scratch, frosted and photographed.

I think this cemented my love affair with cupcakes. How can you not love this cupcake? It's simple too. Take a standard white cake recipe, or any light-coloured recipe and add colour.





Rainbow Cupcakes

Ingredients:
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups flour
1 3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup milk + 1/4 cup milk
food colouring (red, yellow and blue are fine)

Directions:
1. In a medium bowl, cream together sugar and butter.
2. Beat in your eggs one at a time, then stir in your vanilla.
3. Combine flour and baking powder well. Add to mixture and mix well.
4. Stir in 1/2 cup of milk until the batter is smooth. Now, add anything from nothing to an extra 1/4 cup of milk to make it moister. I usually add in a little less than 1/4 cup. Mix until it's smooth.
5. The fun part! Separate the batter into six smaller bowls. It doesn't need to be exact, just roughly the same amount in each bowl. Add in your dye. A lot of food bloggers that have made these recommend gel colouring. I don't know about that, but the liquid food colouring I used worked out perfectly, leaving me with incredibly vibrant colours. I started with half a cap of colouring the first time. Then you can do some adjusting, depending on the shades you want.



6. This is the time consuming part, pouring the batter. (You really don't have to preheat the oven until you're about half or three-quarters way through the cupcake batter. It will have plenty of time to heat up.) Split the purple between the 12 liners and spread so it covers the whole bottom of the liner. Move on to the blue and then all the other colours. While you're spreading the colour, be careful, because if you spread it too vigorously like I did sometimes, you'll go through into the next layer. Not a disaster, but I'd rather my colours stay separate.
7. Preheat oven to 175 C. Grease and flour your tin (or just chuck in some pretty cupcake liners).
8. Bake for 18 minutes and then check on them. They're fairly moist cupcakes. Extremely light cupcakes aren't so good for rainbow-ing. These are done when the top springs back when you poke it lightly.
9. Leave it to cool for a few minutes on a wire rack before taking them all out. Let them cool completely and make your frosting (lemon for me).

Best Lemon Frosting Ever. (So far.)

Ingredients:
1/2 cup (115g) butter, softened
2 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
3 cups (375g) icing sugar

Directions:
Mix everything until smooth! Add in extra lemon juice or icing sugar until you get the intensity and consistency you want.

Frost your cupcakes however you want. I just plopped some on with a spoon and spread it. Make sure the cupcakes are cool before frosting. Otherwise the frosting will melt...yes, I do have prior experience with this.

Enjoy. (: