Red Velvet Carpet

December 17th and 18th: For these two days, I did another cake and frosting duo. I'd started out looking on allrecipes.com for a red velvet cake recipe because I couldn't find one I liked in any of my cookbooks. I came across the one McCormick (you know, the spice, etc. company) had submitted and was about to try it when I started browsing the comments. Most of the comments were good, but more than a few mentioned that the cake was dry. That's when I came across Carrot Top Mom and her comment. Following the link she posted, I ended up here and wound up using her recipe instead because the comments were all good and her cupcakes looked amazing. (She also has the cream cheese frosting recipe to go with these cupcakes, as you can see by going to her red velvet cake recipe page.)

These cupcakes are AMAZING. Seriously, I could've eaten the whole bunch without the addition of frosting. Although, I must say, the frosting was a nice addition.

I was pastry-bag-less when I made these, so I used the ol' cut-a-corner-from-the-Ziploc-bag trick to pile the frosting. I've never been able to use this technique flawlessly, but I'm beginning to think it has to do with the stiffness of my frostings. I added an extra four ounces of powdered sugar to this frosting to make it firmer for piling, but it didn't seem to be enough because the frosting wasn't the consistency I wanted as it came out of the bag. Still, it was firm enough that it piled somewhat, so I was happy about that. I also frosted a batch using a knife rather than the bag because I'm not wild about an overabundance of frosting on my cupcakes. (I'm more into the cake than the frosting, hence why it's so important to me to get a good cake recipe rather than just covering a bad one with good frosting.)

Other than that, I don't have much to say about these recipes. They're awesome and I highly recommend them, so go forth and bake up some red velvet cupcakes, my friends!