Rainbow Bday Cupcakes

Tomorrow is my good friend Brenda's birthday party. To celebrate, I wanted to bake her something... when I asked what she wanted, she said "anything with cream cheese frosting". Oh good, that narrows it down. I love color. I love dinosaurs. I'm going to make rainbow dinosaur cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.

Oh, I went there.

These didn't turn out as nice as I had hoped. They're a pretty good flavor, but the layers were a big fail, and I definitely used 23432 times too much batter in the first batch. They puffed up way higher than normal, which probably had something to do with the excess batter. Try them yourself and let me know how they go... they were still cute and delicious!

Oh, and I got the original recipe here.

You will need (for 10 cupcakes):
1 cup all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup buttermilk - remember that sweet trick I taught you?
1 tsp vanilla extract
red, yellow, green and blue food colorings

Okay, first you'll want to combine the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium sized bowl. Like so.


Next, combine the sugar, eggs, vanilla, oil, and buttermilk in a large bowl.


Add the flour mixture slowly to the egg mixture, stirring as you go. In a bit, you'll end up with something like this!


Now for the fun part. Divide the batter into 5 smaller bowls. Add food coloring to each bowl. For the rainbow, I used blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Where's violet and indigo you say? I say bite me.


See how much batter I used? Don't do what I did. Only do one spoon full for each layer. Trust me.

To make the layers, put the blue in first, then green, then yellow, then orange, and top it off with red. It should look something like this.... but hopefully you're more patient than I am because I clearly started to get lazy.


Then, let these suckers bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.

Holy rise batman!

I didn't take pictures of me making the frosting, so sue me. It's basically 1/2 stick of butter and an 8oz package of cream cheese blended together. Then, you add 1 tsp of vanilla extract and anywhere from 2 1/2 to 4 cups of powdered sugar and mix it all together. Simple, tasty, I wish it was fluffier. Today was not my cupcake day. Anyway.... So I swirled some cream cheese glaze over the cakes... and added some decor.


Hahah! Look at these beauts! With the small bit of leftover batter, I made little cookie sized bites for my roommate to nibble on.


Ok and maybe one or two for me too.



I think he's my favorite.

Enjoy!

Oh... another tip... make sure to wash your hands after using the food dye, especially if it's the concentrated kind like mine. Looks like my hands got sunburned. Sexy.



Have a great weekend!

<3 Courtzilla