My Red Velvet Cupcakes: I thought they were going to be a failure but…

…look how lovely they turned out!

I am pleased as punch!

And to add the icing to the cake (literally), both my kids gave their thumbs up 🙂

I decided to make some red velvet cupcakes today for the first time (recipe taken from Joy of Baking), and everything went rather smoothly at first.  Well, I did run out of red food coloring, but I figured that would just make the cupcakes not as RED as they were supposed to be.  I was short of about a quarter of a tablespoon of coloring by the way.

And when I put those cupcakes to bake in the oven, they did look delicious!  All fluffy and in all their red glory.

But when I made the cream cheese frosting, something didn’t look quite right.  The cream cheese frosting became runnier the more I beat it.  Adding more icing sugar did not help one bit, apart from making the frosting sweeter and sweeter, so in desperation, I chilled the frosting in the fridge, hoping that it would stiffen.  I googled a bit and in my haste, I decided to add corn flour to the icing to make it thicker.

HUGE MISTAKE.

The advice on the net said to add CORN STARCH and not CORN FLOUR.  So I was left with some runny frosting which was powdery in consistency, but on the contrary, tasted rather good.  Still, it was way too runny to be piped on the cupcakes. 🙁

But then I remembered I still had about half a bar of cream cheese left, so I decided to redo the frosting, this time adding the whipping cream a little at a time.

Voila!  I managed to get the cream cheese frosting to the right consistency 🙂

…and you know what?  To be perfectly honest, these taste way better than the ones I bought from a cake store in KL last time… 🙂