I'm planning on making some mini red velvet cupcakes this weekend, and I wanted to go through a dry run so that I could figure out how many cupcakes each batch of batter would make, and how much frosting I would need. So on Tuesday night I made a batch of Cake Man Raven's Red Velvet Cake recipe, and I ended up with 68 mini cupcakes, far more than I had expected. These little gems, each containing only two bites, finished baking quickly, in 14 minutes.
I made a double batch of my favorite cream cheese frosting from the Pumpkin-Raisin Bar recipe on epicurious.com and used a pastry bag with a large round tip to pipe on frosting (this is much faster than using a spatula to frost each cupcake by hand). There was just barely enough frosting to go around; next time I'll probably make 2.5 batches of frosting to make sure each cupcake gets a great big dollop of cream cheese goodness.
These cupcakes were just as tasty as the layer cake form, although the fact that they had a much higher ratio of frosting to cake made the overall flavor profile a little sweeter. I had so many cupcakes that I gave some to Tom to pass onto a friend and I also packed a box to give to my friend Jim. On my way back from lunch in Penn Quarter (where I made the baked goods handoff to Jim), I walked right by the Red Velvet Cupcakery, the latest addition to the D.C. cupcake scene. (The cupcake craze has only recently hit D.C., finally reaching a level of social consciousness where the Washington Post devoted an eight-week series to the search for the town's best cupcake in the fall of 2008. The winner? The Chocolate Ganache Cupcake from Georgetown Cupcake. I have never been to Georgetown Cupcake, but the Post printed the winning recipe, so it's in my queue of recipes to get to some day.)
I was tempted to go into Red Velvet Cupcakery to try their namesake cupcake on for size (after all, since they sell several flavors of cupcakes but decided to name the place "Red Velvet," you have to figure that red velvet should be their best flavor, right?), but I was still stuffed from lunch... the red velvet cupcake tasteoff will have to wait until another day!
Recipes:
I made a double batch of my favorite cream cheese frosting from the Pumpkin-Raisin Bar recipe on epicurious.com and used a pastry bag with a large round tip to pipe on frosting (this is much faster than using a spatula to frost each cupcake by hand). There was just barely enough frosting to go around; next time I'll probably make 2.5 batches of frosting to make sure each cupcake gets a great big dollop of cream cheese goodness.These cupcakes were just as tasty as the layer cake form, although the fact that they had a much higher ratio of frosting to cake made the overall flavor profile a little sweeter. I had so many cupcakes that I gave some to Tom to pass onto a friend and I also packed a box to give to my friend Jim. On my way back from lunch in Penn Quarter (where I made the baked goods handoff to Jim), I walked right by the Red Velvet Cupcakery, the latest addition to the D.C. cupcake scene. (The cupcake craze has only recently hit D.C., finally reaching a level of social consciousness where the Washington Post devoted an eight-week series to the search for the town's best cupcake in the fall of 2008. The winner? The Chocolate Ganache Cupcake from Georgetown Cupcake. I have never been to Georgetown Cupcake, but the Post printed the winning recipe, so it's in my queue of recipes to get to some day.)
I was tempted to go into Red Velvet Cupcakery to try their namesake cupcake on for size (after all, since they sell several flavors of cupcakes but decided to name the place "Red Velvet," you have to figure that red velvet should be their best flavor, right?), but I was still stuffed from lunch... the red velvet cupcake tasteoff will have to wait until another day!
Recipes:
- Red Velvet Cake from Cake Man Raven, recipe available online here.
- Frosting recipe from Pumpkin-Raisin Bars, from epicurious.com.
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