Our friends Terry and Karen invited us up for a Superbowl get together. I was leaning towards my dark chocolate cream filled cupcakes, but decided to try a Red Velvet Cupcake instead.

Red Velvet cake is usually a layered cake, with its flavor somewhere between chocolate and vanilla. Its color is usually bright red to dark red and it is traditionally topped with creamy frosting. The red color is from food coloring, but has its roots in non-Dutch Pressed cocoa and sometimes beets that were used to enhance its color and moisture before alkaline Dutch Process cocoa was widely available (non-alkaline cocoa is redder in color).

Having not made Red Velvet cake before I turned to one of my favorite blogs, Smitten Kitchen for a recipe. If you’re looking for an addicting blog look no further. The site has great photography, writing, and recipes. I’m using the cake recipe but adapting it for cupcakes.

I’m using my own recipe for Cream Cheese Frosting – its fairly basic and I’m sure very common, but its reliable.

The recipe and detailed instructions are at the end of this post. For this recipe, we need cake flour, unsweetened cocoa, salt, canola oil, sugar, eggs, red food coloring, vanilla, buttermilk, baking soda, white vinegar, confectioners sugar and cream cheese. All the ingredients measured out. Ready, set, bake…

Whisk cake flour, cocoa, and salt in a bowl until well combined.

In an electric mixer combine oil and sugar and beat at medium speed until well-blended. It starts to look almost like butter and sugar when it’s combined. Beat in the eggs one at a time until well incorporated.

With the machine on low, slowly add the food coloring and then the vanilla. The recipe calls for 6 tablespoons of food coloring – I only had 4 so I added 2 tablespoons of water. The color turned out great regardless.

Add flour mixture alternately with buttermilk (flour, buttermilk, flour). Scrape down the bowl and beat just long enough to combine. If you cant find buttermilk in the store you can make your own substitute by combing just under a cup of milk and 1 tablespoon white vinegar or lemon juice and let it rest for at least 5 minutes. I used the real stuff for this recipe.

Place baking soda in a small dish, stir in vinegar and add to batter. Beat for 10 seconds. Your batter will start to lightly bubble at this point.

Fill the cupcake liners 3/4 of the way. I like to use a liquid measuring cup with a spout to pure the batter into the liners. I also use a rubber scraper to stop any drips on the side of the measuring cup.

Bake 20 to 25 minutes.