Recipe: Red Velvet Cupcakes

Valentine's Day will soon be upon us and I felt like baking some Valentine's inspired recipes that could be baked for your one and only or a treat for you and your girls if you're doing Galentine's Day. And what a better sweet treat than Red Velvet Cupcakes. They're something I've wanted to bake for a while and now I have my Sugarflair Extra Red Colouring, I can bake them whenever I want. I don't believe this is a conventional recipe for Red Velvet but they taste good and have gone down well with family and friends.

Ingredients
- 110g Butter/Stork, softened
- 110g Caster Sugar
- 110g Plain Flour
- 2 Tsp Baking Powder
- 2 Tsp Cocoa Powder
- 2 Medium Eggs
- 1/4 Tsp Sugarflair Extra Red Food Colouring
- 1 Tub Betty Crocker Ready To Use Vanilla Buttercream

Method 

1. Pre-heat oven to 180C. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with paper cases.
2. Place the softened butter and sugar into the bowl and beat until pale and creamy. I used my stand mixer for this and can't get over how quick and easy it was to cream them together.
3. Sift together the baking powder, flour and cocoa powder then add to the mixture. I find sieving them into a separate bowl first works better than trying to get the sieve around my mixer. Plus you're less likely to make a mess that way. 
4. Beat the eggs and add to the mixture. 
5. Combine everything together, making sure to scrape around the sides of the bowl so that everything is fully incorporated. 
6. Add the food colouring. The Sugarflair colouring is so highly pigmented that you only need the tiniest amount to make a bright red shade that is custom to Red Velvet cupcakes. 
7. Once everything is combined, spoon evenly into the paper cases and pop into the oven for 20-25 minutes. 
8. When they're cooked, leave to cool for five minutes in the tin, then transfer to a wire cooling rack to cool completely. 
9. Once completely cooled, I did cheat and use ready made icing. Sadly buttercream and icings of any kind aren't really my forte even though I am working on them. So for these I cheated and used a tub of Betty Crocker's Ready To Use Vanilla Buttercream icing. I took a small teaspoon and placed a dollop of icing on each cupcake before using a pallet knife to smooth it over the top, adding more icing if necessary.  
10. Leave the icing to set, then once it's set enjoy.