Skip to main content

Blue Velvet Cupcakes for the Bluebirds


It's probably not often that football and baking go hand in hand, but as my beloved Bluebirds are returning to Wembley for the fourth time in as many years (and it'd be nice to actually win for a change), I thought it was about time I tried out something I'd been thinking of for a while. I've never tried a Red Velvet cake, but I had thought about adapting a recipe to make a Blue Velvet version. Instead, I found a fantastic recipe courtesy of Heather Baird of Sprinkle Bakes.

It is notoriously difficult to get a good colour with a Red Velvet cake, and similarly with blue -  I certainly was not able to replicate the deep denim blue Heather managed (at least on this attempt - I'll try a dash more violet next time). I also had the opportunity to use for the first time the US Swan's Down Cake Flour I sourced from The Stateside Candy Co. (A lot of US recipes call for Cake Flour which is very finely ground (think 'oo' flour), enriched and bleached - bleaching is banned in our flour - and can be difficult to find. There are some alternatives you can use, and one is 'Kate Flour' - see A Merrier World  - by Kate Coldrick).

The recipe is straightforward, and resulted in a deliciously tender sponge, with a sweet but hint of sharp cream cheese frosting.

I've adapted some of the US measurements in Heather's recipe to hopefully make it easier.

Ingredients makes approx 12

I cup caster sugar
4oz/113g soft unsalted butter
1 large egg
1/2 tbspn cocoa
1/2 tbspn Wilton Royal Blue gel paste colouring
dab (I added a drop from a cocktail stick) Wilton Violet gel paste colouring
1 1/4 cup cake flour (I checked the weight after sifting and measuring and got 144g)
1/2 tspn salt
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 tspn vanilla extract
1/4 tspn bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tspn white vinegar

For the frosting:
250g pack cream cheese
125g butter softened
1/2 tspn vanilla extract
4 cups (maybe a little more) icing sugar, sifted

Preheat the oven to 155 fan /175 conventional. Prepare a muffin tin with cupcake liners (I think you could get 12 out of this mix).

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and mix.


Mix the food colourings with the cocoa powder to form a paste and add this to the bowl.


Sift the flour and salt together, and add this to the mix in thirds, alternating with the buttermilk.

Mix the bicarbonate of soda with the vinegar in a small bowl (it'll fizz) and then add that to the mixture.

Scoop into the prepared pan, so that each cupcake case is no more than two thirds full.




Bake for 25 - 30 minutes until a cocktail stick comes out clean. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.





Meanwhile, make the cream cheese frosting. It's extremely important that the cream cheese and the butter are soft and at room temperature - if they are too cold, they won't mix properly and the frosting will be lumpy (I have been guilty of this in the past and I can tell you, it's not good).

Mix the cream cheese, butter and vanilla extract until smooth. Add in the icing sugar and beat until light and fluffy.


(I don't seem to have a good track record with cream cheese frosting - it always comes out too runny and in order to rectify it I have to add more sugar. On this occasion I initially halved the proportions in Heather's recipe, so had two cups of icing sugar. It took a further two and a bit cups to find a good consistency, but then I ended up with more icing than I needed. On that basis, you could have a go at halving the cream cheese and butter and sticking with two cups of icing sugar - you may then end up with frosting in the right quantity).

When the cupcakes were totally cool, I then used a piping bag and star nozzle to pipe a swirl on the top of the cupcakes.


Add a bit of magic sparkle ...


Then enjoy.

Unfortunately, you can't sneak one of these, the bright blue tongue is a bit of a giveaway.

Hope you like them. They can of course be used for any team that plays in blue that you may support instead of Cardiff ... :-)

 Good luck on the 26th Feb.C'mon Bluebirds!


Susie







Comments

  1. I love the blue! Great piping - they look really good :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you - that's really nice to hear! They taste good, too! X

      Delete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks, that's great. Will check out you blog, too. Happy baking! :) x

    ReplyDelete
  4. gorgeous cakes, did you use a lot of colouring for this?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Emine - yes it does take quite a bit as you need to counteract the cocoa as well as try and get a nice deep colour. I used 1/2 tbspn - so 7.5ml - of a gel colouring. I've heard that you can get problems with that affecting the taste, but I didn't have a problem. Glad you like them! :)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Your comments are very much appreciated.

Popular posts from this blog

Dark Indulgent Chocolate and Walnut Brownies for the Weekly Bake Off

It's been a great couple of weeks in the Bake Off , as Amy has chosen some fantastic chocolate recipes from Mary Berry's 100 Cakes and Bakes . Although I made last week's American Chocolate Ripple Cheesecake, I didn't enter it. Not because it was a disaster (it was incredibly delicious though very rich - Josh has been able to eek it out all week as he only needs a little piece to get his daily chocolate fix!), but I simply ran out of time. So this week, I decided to get my skates on and make the bake early. Particularly as it's brownies. Yes. Brownies. Those dark, fudgey, chocolatey little bites of heaven. But for me, this week was an experiment. You see, I already have a fantastic brownie recipe . It's been made countless times and been played around with to give an endless variety of treats. (Have I ever mentioned Maya Gold in brownies? Yes? Well I'll have to post about them someday soon because they are amazing - like some sort of out of body exp

Limoncello Cake

I really love this cake. I mean really love it. So much so, it's my new best friend. It's like sunshine on a plate. The citrussy aroma tempts you while the sultry lemony pucker hits you full in the mouth. And who can resist anything with 'Limoncello' in the title? The mere mention of the word transports you to to the Sicilian sun. It's one more reason I have to thank Random Recipes for getting me to delve into my cookbooks. This month's challenge had a bit of a twist. Dom, of Belleau Kitchen (who runs the challenge) created a Randometer thingummy-bob to test us. You had to enter how many cookbooks you owned, and then it would generate a random number. You counted along your shelf to that book, and then entered the number of pages, to generate another number and so find your Random Recipe. The gods must have been looking favourably on me this month, as I ended up with this gorgeous lemon cake, from Peggy Porschen's 'Boutique Baking

Pistachio and Lemon Cake (with a helping of news on the side)

Gosh, where has the time gone? So how've you been? Good I hope. Great stuff. And Me? Not so much. But getting there. I've been away a while, I know. Lots of things happening. Some not, but hey, that's life. Since we last spoke, I've left my job of 19 years (health reasons), and that seems scary. Mike's job was victim to a reorganisation, so that gave him the opportunity to take redundancy. That seems scary, too. As they say, timing is everything. So in a burst of mid-life shenanigans, we've decided to start our own business. A coffee shop. With a bakery - cakery attached. O. M. G. That seems very freakin' scary! But exciting, too. Hopefully soon, we'll be taking on the lease of a small shop near us. Fitting it out, and then opening our doors to entice hungry shoppers with the delicious smell of good coffee and freshly baked cakes. It's going to be a lot of hard work. I can't wait. But I have to. The legalities, yo