Rainbow Cupcakes

My youngest sister graduated from high school this weekend. She was homeschooled and she had a graduation ceremony with two other girls from a homeschool co-op that her and my brother have been attending. So for the graduation each of the graduates had a special table with things that represented themselves - their interests, pictures, etc. They were also supposed to bring cupcakes to serve after the ceremony. So I agreed to make cupcakes for her. When I asked what kind she wanted she told me she liked bright colors. So what better way to have bright colors, than to have rainbow colored cupcakes?

I went in search of a recipe and found this recipe from Baking Bites. I looked over several recipes before deciding on this one. It looked fairly simple and I liked the fact that it would be a thinner batter to mix the colors in. The day before, I did a trial run of a dozen cupcakes to make sure they would turn out and any potential fails could be avoided. I did pretty good, and they actually weren't too difficult.

Before I started these, I decided I needed an apron. I'm just too messy in the kitchen. Especially if flour is involved. So I found some purple/lavender fabric and some rainbow sequin ribbon and created an apron for myself. I didn't get a picture unfortunately because I looked a little scary, but I will take one and post it eventually. But I'm pretty sure I'm the only one that liked my apron. Everyone else had either a "what in the world?" reaction, or just laughed at it. Rude.

So the day of, I gathered my supplies.

The only thing different I did from the recipe was used "Better for Bread" flour instead of all-purpose flour and used sunflower oil instead of vegetable oil. They still turned out fine. In the recipe she only makes 10 cupcakes. For my purposes I needed more cupcakes so I doubled the recipe and split it up to make 24 cupcakes instead of 20. There was plenty of batter for this.

When you get to mixing everything together, when you mix the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, be sure not to stir it too much. Stir until everything is just mixed. It will be lumpy.

This is good. You are going to stir all the lumps out when you add the food coloring. I used gel food colorings. You could conceivably do this with as many or few or whatever colors you want. I just used red, yellow, green, blue, and mixed my own orange.

fancy :)
So when your batter is all mixed up you layer the colors on top of each other in the muffin tin. I lined mine with white paper cups, since they would be travelling and it would be easier that way. Layer all your colors, in rainbow order, or whatever order you like, being sure not to stir or you'll end up with tie dye cupcakes I suppose. Just let each layer spread on its own. You will use about 1/2 tbsp of each color per cupcake.

As each layer went in, they got smaller and wouldn't spread out as far, but it wasn't bad. They still looked cute when they were done.

And you could see the rainbow colors through the white papers, so that was perfect.

For my frosting, I found this recipe for vanilla whipped cream frosting. Really simple and easy to get mixed up.

Three ingredients

All done!

My mom bought this weird decorating kit that came with a big syringe looking thing that you are supposed to put the icing in and then use it to decorate cakes and stuff. I used it, but it was difficult and made a HUGE mess. So next time I will definitely not be using it, I will just use the standard icing bag with decorating tips. But, all things considered they turned out pretty well.

I just did a simple spirally swirly shape on top. That's about all I have the skills for, and I didn't want them to look like dog poo. (You're welcome, sis.) I added some rainbow sprinkles on top, and called them good!

I'm pretty proud of how they turned out. And they were a big hit at the graduation. They went fast and I got lots of compliments. I promise my head's not too big. However, I will not be making these again any time soon, because they took me FOUR HOURS to make two dozen cupcakes. I know I'm not the fastest baker, but geez. It's just so time consuming to pour the batter in each cup by tiny spoonfuls. Plus I wanted to make sure these looked good since they were for a special occasion. But, all in all, they were a success, so go me!

So pretty :)