Whimsical Rainbow Cupcakes! (with pictures)

A.K.A. my best attempt yet using food colouring!

Okay so I know I said I'd tell you some facts about me today but I was so excited from creating the blog that I really just wanted to get started with a cake post. (Sorry - but I will tell you some facts about me soon) 

I wanted to show you guys these colourful cupcakes that I made a few days ago - they remind me of one of my favourite childhood books - The Cat in the Hat. I don't really know why but hey ho!

(I like polka dots - can you tell?)

How cute are they?! I was so impressed with the colour both on the butter cream and the sponge itself as when I've tried to do it before the colour didn't turn out quite the way I'd have hoped. Coincidentally it was my third time trying this out so third time lucky guys!

So anyway that's all I really wanted to show you but if you'd like to know how to make these cakes I'll provide everything I used and did below!

The recipe I use for the sponge has always been my go-to cake mix, I've used it for a few years and after some practice every batch is a good batch of cakes! If you would like to follow the sponge mix I use CLICK HERE, but by all means if you have a preferred method then go ahead and use that. Its once the sponge mix is all ready to go that we can have the real fun.

Once your sponge is ready to go you will need to get your food colouring! I really wanted to use rainbow colours so I opted for red, orange, green, blue and pink - however you can use as many or as little colours as you want. Now, regarding food colouring I have never had the best experiences, they have either turned out looking mouldy or just not bright enough for my liking, however recently, I stumbled upon Pro Gel rainbow dust and that will forever be the food colouring I use for future bakes. (Its brilliant!) Anyway - split you're sponge into however many colours you are using, e.g. if you are using 5 colours, use 5 bowls. And then add a small amount of your dye in each of the bowls and mix!

Once each bowl is properly mixed add in your colours to your cupcake cases. There are two ways for you to do this;

1. The first method is to add a colour and then flatten in down so the colour touches each edge of the case - so from a side view it will look stripy. I tried this for the cakes in the pictures above and it worked fine but some of the colours from a side view looked very thin. For example - 

   

   This is what I mean - you can see lots of orange and red however not so much of the blue! 

2. The second is to simply just throw the colours in at a time - making sure they don't mix with each other obviously. Since making the above cakes I did try this method and personally I thought it looked better both on the side and when you took a bite out of it! Here's a example picture of what I mean for the second method. -

Literally just throw them in! (Ok maybe not literally)

So once all this colour lark is done with put them in the oven for around 15-20 minutes - for me the cakes are done for bang on 15 minutes.

And voila! - Colourful cakes!

The next part for me - usually - is very 'faffy' and that's the butter cream. For these cakes I used the Betty Crocker Vanilla Butter cream Style Icing and again just split it into as many colours as I wanted and mixed them in with the colours. For the butter cream I used orange, blue, pink and green as I wanted colours that would really stand out against each other. Once this is done its then time for the piping bag! Dun dun dun!

For this magical method I actually have one large piping bag which is split into 3 small bags, so I can add my different colours and connect them all together and then the three colours come out nicely (I swapped between the green and blue colours). I purchased mine at Hobby craft but I'm assuming there are some elsewhere! However (I am yet to try this) but I have read and seen on videos that you can achieve the same affect by using one piping bag and adding in the colours individually by rotating the piping bag so they don't touch. When all the colours are in the piping bag just simply push down and begin decorating like you usually would. There are plenty of videos explaining this method in better detail than I can. 

Once piping is done you will have cupcakes that (hopefully) look playful and colourful! You can either choose to leave them as they are or if you are like me you can decorate them with some white pearl balls - or anything! 

Just as a disclaimer I am not a professional baker by any means - nor do I claim that this is the best method for achieving these cakes. I just enjoy baking in my free time and wanted to share with you my excitement for my first successful food colouring attempt! Thank you for reading and if you do try making these cakes please let me know! 

Again sorry if there are any spelling mistakes or badly worded sentences, I'm new to blogging and although I'm very excited to be doing just that I'm a tad bit anxious, hence any mistakes or 'waffley bits'. 

But thank you for reading and have a lovely day!!

Ricicle x