Red velvet cupcakes

A friend of mine broke her ankle, so I decided to make some red velvet cupcakes to cheer her up before her surgery on Monday. This is another recipe from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes, a book I am beginning to love a great deal.

I had most of the ingredients for this one except Dutch-process cocoa and red gel-paste food coloring. I went on an epic quest for these ingredients, which ultimately led me to Meijer, which had both.

The cupcakes begin by blending sugar and oil, which is weird, and then eggs, food coloring, and vanilla. The mixture was taking on a definite red hue by this time.


After this stage, you alternately blend in a flour-cocoa-salt mixture and buttermilk. After adding the cocoa, the batter was decidedly less red, but still reddish.


I topped them with cream cheese frosting, as recommended by Martha. This was a pretty rich frosting, but it made the cupcakes really cute.


You can see that they are not really all that red, but actually, when you bit into them, the inside was redder than the outside. (Weird.) They were really good, though. Chalk another one up to Martha.