Red Velvet Cupcakes

I love love love love Red Velvet cake. Ever since I bought some from Cupcake Central here in Melbourne a year back for the first time I was in love. So I bought some Red Velvet cake mix. Yummo but I have been wanting to try them from scratch and when I received my 'Cake Boss' cookbook - lo and behold there is a recipe in there for it. So I thought I would make them before my second lot of Buttermilk doesn't go bad.

Seeing my middle child was home sick from school today due to an extremely sore throat I thought I would make them as he wants to be the chef. I used half the recipe as it actually makes 2 x 9inch cakes or 24 cupcakes but I didn't want to make that much.

The below recipe is the full recipe not what I used. I halved the quantities - yep I put in half an egg.

Red Velvet Cake from 'Baking with the Cake Boss'

Ingredients:

1 1/4 cups vegetable shortening - I used Crisco

2 cups sugar

1 tablespoon (TBS) unsweetened Dutch process cocoa powder (I used normal)

4 1/2 teaspoons (ts) red food colouring gel

3 cups of cake flour

1 1/4 ts salt

1 1/4 ts vanilla extract

1 1/4 ts baking soda

1 1/4 ts white vinegar

3 extra large eggs

1 1/4 cups buttermilk

- Something to grease the pans

Method:

Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius

1. Put shortening, sugar, cocoa, food colouring, flour, salt, vanilla, baking soda and vinegar in a stand mixer with paddle attachment. Mix on low speed until mixed, then raise speed to medium for about a minute.

2. Add eggs - one at a time and mix for about 1 minute each until mixture absorbs them. Add the buttermilk in two portions - make sure you scrap the sides between each addition.

3. Grease your baking dish or cupcakes pan (I just used patties and skipped this step).

4. Divide the batter into your pans - for the mini cupcakes I used 1 teaspoon for each one and the big ones 1 ice cream scoop each.

5. For 9inch cake bake for 35-40mins - mini cupcakes bake for 10mins and big cupcakes for 18mins.

Ice with cream cheese frosting.

Cream Cheese Frosting

1/4 cup butter

1 cup icing sugar

250g block cream cheese

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Mix butter and cream cheese together until well mixed

Add vanilla and mix. Add icing sugar in batches (1/4 cup at a time if you can) and mix each batch for about a minute. Put on cupcakes and put in fridge or serve straight away. As it has cream cheese you can't leave out.