Colourful cupcakes

While getting lost surfing through many of the wonderful blogs out there, I came across these gorgeous, bright cupcakes. They looked so good that I had to give them a try. This was one of my first goes at using food dye and I was so happy with the result.

Recipe:
I used the very basic, yet affective Vanilla Cupcake recipe from the book 500 Cupcakes.
- 225g of self-raising flour
- 225g of caster sugar
- 225g of butter
- vanilla essence*
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 4 eggs

I preheated the oven to 160 with the fan on. Pre-line the cake tins with clear cupcake cases.

In a medium mixing bowl, beat with an electric mixer all ingredients. For some reason I decided to put the butter in last, this actually helped when mixing as it made the batter smoother.

In tiny individual bowls, I poured in a few tablespoons of cake batter. In each bowl, I put a few drops of red, green, yellow and red in. Make sure you have an individual teaspoon for each bowl so the colours don't mix too much.

Then dollop a small amount of colour in each bowl. I mixed it up a bit so they weren't all the same kind. Some had pink & yellow, others had pink, yellow, blue & green, some purple & green etc. etc.

Place both trays in the oven (at the same time) and leave for 20-35 minutes.

Let it cool on a wire rack (or if it's a hot day in the fridge it goes) to chill. For the icing I cheated and used Betty Crocker Vanilla Icing. I love this stuff. It applies well, and tastes so good you could eat it out of the container.

NB** With the vanilla essence, I poured in a teaspoon of Vanilla Bean Paste and a dollop of Vanilla Essence into a small bowl and mixed it around. It gave a wonderful, strong vanilla flavour and helped as it didn't have any other flavour to it.