“fawking awesome” red velvet cupcakes (and death by frosting)

Me. Baking red velvet cupcakes. Are you kidding?? I mean honestly, if you’d told me a year ago, wait scratch that, if you’d told me three months ago that I would be creating from scratch painfully scrumptious and most adorable little red velvet cupcakes, I would have probably gagged on my vitamin water (orange+orange, c+calcium, I don’t know why I’m plugging vitamin water but yum, it’s my current favourite thing) and possibly made a mess of me. And you.

Three months ago, I didn’t even own a mixing bowl.

But stranger things have happened. From my first foray into baking, straight into some hiccups which were quickly frosted over with vanilla butter cream, and my very new crazy awesome Hummingbird Bakery cookbook, I’m now a total pro at uh… at least at removing the whisky bits from my electric mixer because trust me, that one took me quite a while to figure out.

So Sunday morning sees me in the kitchen, surrounded by a myriad of ingredients (white wine vinegar? why?) amidst an icing sugar A-bomb. Yeh, don’t ask, it was messy. Several hundred wet wipes later, we are back on track. As usual, I follow the instructions to a tee because lord knows that when it comes to baking, I have the confidence of a pimply 14 year old boy. A smelly one.

Despite being somewhat longwinded, the instructions are fairly clear and I don’t change a thing. I even use a whole half a bottle of red food colouring (one way ticket to food colouring hell), which by the way completely vitoes my angst-ridden internal debate over whether or not I should have added the two whole drops to my choc mint cheesecake.

Alas, goodness comes undone again. Why ever be good in the first place? 

Anyway the baking was phenomenally fun, especially with my very new, very cool cupcake cups from Charmaine. I’d baked, cooled and frosted my dozen (plus three mini) cupcakes when the real challenge presented itself smack in my Sunday morning face. Uh-oh, they don’t tell me how to do the crumbly red sprinkles atop each cupcake. Dammit. DAMMIT.

I thought for a minute. Or two or ten. And I had an idea. I had to improvise (which to me, a near baking virgin, is like waaaait a minute what do you think happens if I stick the wet cable in the power socket? Should we try it? Should we? Should we?). Who knew what was going to happen, but I didn’t think death by electrocution was on the cards, so I went ahead and sacrificed one of my mini cupcakes. I crumbled him into a bazillion little pieces, said a prayer, and sprinkled his remains over the top of the remaining cupcakes.

There is pride in death, my friend.

He made my cupcakes look so fawking awesome I wanted to cry. 

(I have to say “fawking awesome” like a South African because we’ve just seen District 9, and omg go and fawking see it, it’s fawking great)

ps: By the way, it’s also National Cupcake Week this week but who am I kidding, as if I needed an excuse to do this…

pps: Just a note about the cream cheese frosting recipe. I found that the below proportions made enough for 24 cupcakes (even though the book says it’s for 12) so unless you’d like to experience death-by-frosting (actually, not a bad way to go when you think about it), I’d cut the quantity by half.