Red Velvet Cupcakes with Vanilla Cream Cheese Frosting

 The Quest for the Perfect Cupcake continues. This week, per the requests made on my last post, I decided to tackle Red Velvet Cupcakes. Now, I may be the only person I know who has never actually tried red velvet cupcakes. When I mentioned that I had never tried them, my comments were greeted by shock and horror! I am more of a chocolate and caramel girl, so this whole red velvet thing was new to me.

http://www.sprinklesandtrinkets.com/

Unfortunately, since I had never tried a red velvet cupcake, I had nothing to compare it to, and no way to know if the cupcakes I made measured up to the famous cupcakeries. I did some very technical research (googled ``best red velvet recipe``) and found the best reviewed allrecipes.com recipe that had notes for suggested improvements. I took all of this into consideration and then visited my local cake decorating shop, just around the corner from me: . It`s a lovely little store and the owner has tons of super cute cake boxes and decorating supplies.

Source

I actually went to Sprinkles and Trinkets because the recipe I found called for a one ounce bottle of red food coloring. The cake store carried a baking emulsion that I could use in place of the red dye (because who really needs to ingest the entire contents of a one ounce bottle of food coloring??). The emulsion worked great, I only needed two tablespoons for the entire recipe of 30 cupcakes!

I followed the recipe for the icing exactly as was directed, and was not impressed with the outcome. The recipe promised that if I started with cold cream cheese and butter then I would be able to make a big tall pile of icing. Not so much. It was kind of hot when I made the icing, but I followed the recipe exactly as outlined and was able to make pipable icing, but nothing thick and stable enough to properly pipe a cupcake. It was however super-delicious, and would be awesome topping for cinnamon buns, berry scones, or just plain old toast.
Now, without further ado, here is the recipe:


Red Velvet Cupcakes with Vanilla Cream Cheese Frosting
Adapted from Carrot Top Mom
Ingredients
2 ¼ cups flour
½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 cup butter, softened
2 ¼ cups sugar
4 eggs
1 cup sour cream
½ cup buttermilk (or milk with 2 tsp of lemon juice)
2 tbsp Lorrann Red Velvet Baking Emulsion (or 2 tsp – 1 ounce red food coloring)
4 teaspoons vanilla extract
Cream Cheese Frosting
1 8 ounce package cream cheese, cold
¼ cup butter, cold
2 tbsp sour cream
2 tsp vanilla extract
4 cups icing sugar
Directions
Preheat oven to 350F. Mix flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt in medium bowl. Set aside.

Beat butter and sugar in large bowl with electric mixer on medium speed five minutes or until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time (or have your helper do it!). 

Mix in sour cream, milk, baking emulsion and vanilla. Gradually beat in flour mixture on low speed until just blended. Spoon batter into 30 paper-lined baking cups. I used my large cookie scoop. 

This batter is really thick and the usual scoop I use for my cupcakes wasn’t releasing the batter into the cups. The cookie scoop worked much better.

Bake 18-20 minutes or until toothpick inserted into cupcake comes out clean. Gently remove from oven. Cool in pans on wire rack at least five minutes. Remove from pans, cool completely. 

Frost with cream cheese frosting. I baked my cupcakes in the evening, stored them overnight in a Tupperware container until the icing was made the next day.
Vanilla Cream Cheese Frosting: With a high powered mixer, beat cold cream cheese, butter, sour cream and vanilla in large bowl until light and fluffy. Scrape bowl and beat again. Gradually beat in icing sugar until smooth. Once smooth, turn beaters to high speed and whip for five minutes.

Frost the cupcakes generously, and serve at room temperature. I tried to pipe my icing with a star tip, and it didn’t pile up super high. It was definitely delicious though – next time I will probably just use an open round tip and make a lovely blob of icing on the top of the cupcakes.

So how did this recipe fare on my Quest for the Perfect Cupcake? As far as cupcakes go, this was a moist, delicious, flavorful cupcake with a perfectly sweet, rich icing. However, there must be more out there for me to conquer on my quest…. I got a new cupcake cookbook as a gift, I might find a few gems in there to test out on my quest!